More hoops to jump through

Friday afternoon, I went to my orthotist to get the 1½" lift for my new Birkenstock sandals. My thinking was that if I went to the local office, which is in the same place as my orthopaedic surgeon's practice, that I wouldn't have to concern myself with the issue of getting a prescription for it, since I'd be right there where I could ask my doctor to write me one for the lift. Turns out my doctor wants the orthopaedic surgeon who treated my injured Achilles tendon last summer to be the one to write the prescription for my lift, only this made almost no sense to me at all. The Achilles injury was to the right ankle. The shoe needing the lift is the left one. I failed to see the relationship between these two things, other than the fact that the last time I saw the orthotist was to get a one eighth inch lift made for under the insole of my right shoe to help treat my Achilles tendonitis last summer. But that prescription was written by my normal orthopaedic surgeon who I regularly see, not the ankle doctor who treated me last summer. Well, it turns out that the thinking is that the ankle issue is the result of my shortened leg, so that is why the one doctor wanted me to have the other doctor write the prescription, which meant having to pull out my cell phone and call the ankle specialist to see if he'd be willing to write my prescription for the lift. If this is always going to be the case every time I buy new shoes, then I may as well go to the orthotist clinic at the ankle doctor's office in Akron instead of going to the local Kent office to save on having to make a million phone calls just to get a shoe lift done and paid for by insurance. Most regular cobblers won't even do lifts without a doctor's prescription anymore, so afraid are they, like just about everybody these days, of lawsuits. It's so crazy that I have to get a new prescription with every pair of shoes and then verify the doctor's authorization with the insurance company before I can even hope to get one dime of insurance coverage for my orthotics, and even then, there's no guarantee that they will even cover it in the first place because they may well throw this under my "deductible" for the year and make me pay the full cost of the lift. Why they have to make everything so complicated is beyond me, but that's the new way of things now in the 21st century with health care. The patient has to go through a whole song and dance before getting any kind of treatment, and the doctors have to negotiate with insurance companies before they can prescribe any kind of treatment or tests. It's all so wrong and unfortunately, any changes in our health care system under the Obama administration are going to be negligible compared to what ought to be done. Keeping for-profit providers at the table as players in the health care reform debate and excluding single payer advocates can only assure that we won't see any significant changes in our broken system any time soon.

SCHOOL'S OUT!
This weekend is commencement at Kent State University. Most of the graduates received their diplomas yesterday and I think there is still another ceremony yet to go today, but the 2008-09 school year at Kent State is over, meaning the students have packed up and gone home for the summer. This always results in far less traffic and far quieter nights here in Kent, something I welcome yearly. It's always tough on business in our area since so many of them rely on student money to stay afloat, and in this tough economy, that can be a really difficult thing. But it's nice to have fewer cars on the road, quieter nights, fewer parking problems, less trash on front lawns and a return to a more residential feel to the neighborhoods during the summer months when the students are gone. Naturally, things get pretty rowdy at the beginnings and ends of school years, and this year was no exception. It seems to go with the territory and when the students return in August to still warm nights and summery weather, I predict some out of hand nights when things get crazy and the cops come in droves to break up big loud parties or to crack down on DUI drivers coming home from the bars at night. Since the drinking age has been raised to 21, house parties become basically unregulated bars where underage students can drink with impunity. Since you typically don't turn 21 until your junior or senior year in college, that means that for the majority of your college career, you can't go to a bar and drink, something that is an essential part of college life. If the drinking age were lowered to 18, at least they could drink in a more regulated environment and if they got out of hand, the bouncer at the bars would kick them out. But with house parties, there are no regulations and people can act stupid and disrupt entire neighborhoods and put more strain on safety forces who have to beef up every weekend to keep the peace. I'm tired of my street having unregulated bars at every single house, meaning that hundreds of students come streaming down my street on warm summer nights to go to these nefarious house parties where they can drink until they're falling down drunk and act like fools and trash people's property without any consequences. I think that the legal drinking age ought to be lowered to 18 with a specification that you can only drink "low beer", 3.2, which is what we were allowed to drink when I was 18. I don't know if it would cut down on house parties, but it would give a big boost to liquor stores and bars and would prove to be a bit of an economic stimulus package for college towns like ours, and that can't be a bad thing, after all.