Skip to main content

How do you pay $240 per month for cable and phone?

How do you pay $240 per month for cable and phone? Simple, you spend 5 days at Howard County General Hospital. As you may know, my wife delivered our twins at HCGH. Overall, the people there (nurses, techs, doctors) were extremely nice and helpful. In fact, I would give them a 9 out of 10. However, the hospital itself is the provider of what has to be the most expensive basic cable + phone service ever! Why? Today I got a bill for television and phone services that was provided to us while my wife was admitted at HCGH. The bill was for $40 for a 5 day stay (which works out to be $8 per day or $240 per month). For basic cable and local only phone service!

Sure that's way way expensive but that's not the worst. The hospital doesn't provide a clear way for patients to opt out of this service. It is automatically turned on once you're admitted and nobody in the hospital (at least not all the people I asked) knows how to turn it off. In fact, one nurse we asked said tv was free!

Anyway, I got the bill, calculated the daily rate and promptly got pissed. I called the 3rd party billing company HCGH uses and after a 5-minute conversation, they removed the charges. Now, if you've ever tried to get an American company to forgive a bill, you know it usually takes more than 5 minutes. When it takes less than that, you know the company is aware of its own shaddy practices (like when Vista print sneaks monthly charges unto your business card order). I asked the customer service rep how patients are supposed to know they need to cancel this automatic service and she said I should take their (the 3rd party's) information and call themnext time I am admitted at HCGH. How preposterous!

I called the hospital and spoke to the nurse supervisor in charge, thinking she'll have a resonable answer for me. She didn't. In fact, she joined me in complaining because her husband was also charged after being admitted at HCGH.

To me, this looks like a racket being perpetuated by the hospital. They automatically turn on the services; bill you via a 3rd party and hope you pay just for convenience (after all, how many people want to deal with spurious charges during their convalescence?) And if 1 or 2 patients call and complain, they've pre-authorize their 3rd party billing dept to automatically waive the charges. After all, that'll be cheaper than not billing your patients $8 per day for substandard cable and local phone service!


Popular posts from this blog

InfoPath & SharePoint (Part 1)



quit immediately while you still have your sanityFirst, InfoPath:



In InfoPath, you simply can't do this.…

Career 101: Dunk, layup or dribble out of bounds?

Saw this on Whisper:

The way I see it, this dude has 3 options:
Reject the $55K increase and stick with his old job that he loves (dribble out of bounds)Take the $170K to his current boss and negotiate for a raise (layup)Take the $170K job, stick with it for a year and then bounce (dunk) The first option is what I call a poor person's advice. It sounds very noble...very "get a job you love and you'll never work". Well I am here to say that's bullshit (mostly). This is business; you should always get the most you can. Besides, this is a chance for this dude to change his baseline salary for future jobs. At his current job, getting that $55K will take several years because corporate America isn't going to offer you more than a token raise each year.

My advice would be to take the $170K offer to his current manager and get him/her to match it or raise his current salary. That's the layup option. It's not too money-hungry and doesn't summarily leave $5…

What to do?

I recently bought one of those wireless earbuds from Amazon. I spent some time researching all the available options and finally picked this particular one. It was highly rated on Amazon 5 stars from 54 reviewers (most of them "verified purchase"). Not great but not bad. Anyway, the earbuds arrived and I found this in the box:

Hmm, OK. Very mysterious. As instructed, I sent them an email for further information. Here's what I received:

Funny thing is I really like the ear buds. Excellent build quality and thus far, great performance. They reconnect to my phone 2-3 seconds after taking them out of the case. It's easy to create a good seal...sometimes so good I get that underwater feeling one gets with noise cancelling headphones. Even without the 40% incentive, I would have written a review...that's how much I like the ear buds. But now I feel weird about doing it. I wonder how many of those 54 5-star reviews were motivated by a 40% discount.

As for the 40% discou…