Healthcareless

Today's (Nov 20 '07) Wall Street Journal carried a front page article about a woman & family in the state of Missouri who went through quite a bit of trouble in life when she met with a really bad accident. The article is pretty detailed and describes the situation in all respects. The matter that struck me the most is the absolute apathy of the way the Federal & State law is codified and with what ruthlessness corporate America enforces it. Of course, we are a capitalist economy and businesses should do all that they can to further their economic causes. However, at the same time, how should we treat human life? This is always contentious. Just as in the Iraq war, is human life expendable in return for economic gain? And this particular situation was not even about war. This is just Walmart and its employee.
The gist of the matter was that a car was hit by a semi-trailer on the passenger side with a poor Mrs. Shank being seriously injured. This lady was left in coma at the age of 45 with a family of three sons. The health insurance system was good enough to pay the bills promptly. Eventually, the Shank family sued the trucking company and was awarded a $750,000 benefit by the courts. Justice served ain't it? Of that 3 quarter million dollars, quite a bit went towards bills and medical expenses. About $470,000 was put it into a court-created trust for future maintenance or whatever. Three years passed by with life coming to a routine for the Shank family. Suddenly, Walmart woke up and decided to sue the Shank family for all the money. The logic is a "subrogation" clause that walmart employees sign up to when they sign up for their employment contracts. From the article, it sounds as though subrogation is a common item in employment contracts. The courts favored Walmart in this case and the Shanks had to give up all the money. To add injury to the insult (after the first injury), the middle son of the Shank family was killed in the Iraq war serving the very country where his mother was injured and was not paid benefits. Now, Mrs. Shank is divorced (apparently because she may get more benefits as a single woman as opposed to being a married woman) and lives in memory loss, unable to feed or dress herself with the husband in grief and one son no more. Walmart on the other hand has a market capitalization of close to $185,000,000,000 and has 1,900,000 employees. This company went and sued the poor lady and her family and took away what little they had.
I agree that the law took its course and the situation may be legally fair and binding. I am a complete free market proponent and would not let my emotions come between sane business decisions. However, does this make sense? Heck no! It is obvious that the law needs some looking into and Walmart could surely do with one or two less lawyers with free time on their hands. According to Walmart, they did this because they have the obligation to other employees by recovering costs and in effect contributing to the health planning for all their employees. However, something tells me that those $470,000 are going to find a nice place in the P&L statement and eventually into shareholder pockets. Once again, I agree that shareholder is king. However, in this case, the subjects are clearly at loss.
Hope someone corrects this in the Congress.

Have you been approached with Hedge Fund Investing?

A financial adviser recently approached me with the prospect of investing into a fund that in turn invested in large hedge funds. While the idea looks fascinating, I am pretty confident that hedge fund investing is not for me and for most of the people I spend my time at work and play. Agreed, hedge funds probably return in many multiples of what an average joe mutual fund or directed investment plan will return. Hedge funds have the best names in the market associated with them. Agreed that partners at Hedge Funds are perhaps the most handsomely paid professionals or owners in the country today. However, all these positive points have a cost. Firstly, it is the risk. That's the biggest factor to consider. Having said that, I won't talk too much about it. Thats coz risk is matter of individual/institutional perception. There is no yardstick for risk. It is all relative to your risk appetite. For example, skiing is considered very risky by some people and hence not a favored game. There are others who would rather spend all their time in the mountains over anywhere else. The fact of the matter is that hedge funds are also extremely expensive. It is typical for a hedge fund to charge upwards of 2% of assets under management as fees. At the lowest level that puts it close to an expensive mutual fund. Next, Hedge Funds usually keep something like 20% of profits for themselves. WOOOOW! Finally, most hedge funds lead to ordinary income and hence taxable as short term gains along with your other income (you have your bread and butter job don't you?). These three things make Hedge Fund investing really unsuitable for an individual investor putting her/his hard-earned money into a fund of Hedge Funds. There is a very good article at the NYSE website that provides more information. Happy reading and wish you a safe investment.

Bush Jokes

Just like Santa Banta jokes and blonde jokes Bush jokes are always funny. Even better are those serious mistakes he makes as President of our great nation. Surely, I do not condone those mistakes, but hey, everyones gotta get a break. Somebody gets a blowjob, others take international bribes. This guy fights expensive wars and gives out a steady stream of bloopers! What serious fun! Here is the output of a nice little utility from http://www.chimpomatic.net/ that gives out a new funny blooper serious mistake from El Presidente each time you refresh this page. Enjoy! (If you refresh and don't see a new blooper, you might feel like complaining; If you do, pleas go to chimpomatic site to complain. Or, go to www.whitehouse.gov.)

Dr. Didgooder

This is a follow up to my earlier post. A close friend of mine responded to the call for blood donors. Here is what he had to say about it:

Hi Sachin,

Just wanted to let you and your friends know that I met the
parents and gave blood. As of now I think they have good number of
IOUs from the blood bank. Manish was mentioning was that he needs
a couple of IOUs for A+ platelets, so if I knew anyone who was A+
then i should contact them.

I also spoke to Mahish and Shweta as well for about 15 minutes.
The situation is very heart-rendering and brought tears to my
eyes.
Shweta is the pillar of strength, was cheerful and smiling while
speaking to Om. Om likes Spiderman and doesn't like coming to
hospitals.
Mansih's mom also spoke a few words.
Manish told me that they had lost his dad some 15 days back. His
dad was in the army and very strong in life. And very attached to
Om and very affected by the news (revealed to them on August 7th).
Manish courageously mentioned that his dad's blessings were with
them now and hopefully things will improve.

The Tata Memorial (cancer) Hospital's doctors have said that this
99% curable and from what i have read from your link seems to say
that the child will be fine. I pray so.

This is a very courageous family; this sort of test seems
unimaginable and seems to shake one's faith.

I urge our community and whoever knows them to express their
friendship and support in whatever way possible. A card,gift -
spiderman would be a good gift - the parents must not feel
alone.

Thanks for letting me know of this and allowing me to make a
contribution.

Regards
Santanu

And hence the world spins around.

Dr. Dogooder

This week, I received a request from a couple of associates. It was for locating help for a 5 year old boy who was suffering from Leukemia and was in need of blood donors. I am in Chicago and this boy is in Mumbai, so I could not have donated (could I have?). However, I did forward on the message to others who were in a better position than me to help out. The boy has help now but you never know when he may need more help. If you read this blog, please do call the parents of this boy (ask me for the phone number). Here is the message to my friends, associates and the readers of this blog:

Friends and Associates,

Time to time, life puts all of us through different tests. Some of us pass tests with flying colors and others don't. These tests come in various shapes and sizes and never come with a warning. Some tests are easy and others painful and hard. One family in my extended friend circle is going through one such tough test. This family is in Mumbai and their 5 yr old child is admitted at the TATA hospital in Parel with Leukemia. For the few (like me) who did not know, leukemia is a cancer of blood in which the bone marrow produces excessive and defective white blood cells which then inhibit many other functions of the blood stream. I found lot more info here: http://www.kidshealth.org/parent/medical/cancer/cancer_leukemia.html.

Sitting in Chicago, I cannot do much else but pass this message to all of you. If you are connected to Mumbai please heed this family's request for locating blood donors. You could also pass this request to other equally committed folks who may be willing to help out.

The contact number for the parents of this 5 yr old child is ... and the names are Boblu and Shweta. The child's name is Om. The parents are currently based out of Santa Cruz and the hospital in Parel.

Please do what you can. Do not hesitate to write back to me if you have questions or cannot reach Boblu and Shweta on the phone number above.

Thanks,
Sachin

And hence, ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.

Facebook IPO talk

Gotcha! You read the title of this article and clicked on the link to read a prediction on the next big investment opportunity! Didn't you? Sorry, no predictions from me. Me no Nostradamous! However, I did read something very interesting on Barron's. I am going to copy paste that piece of text verbatim here. Also, before you read that, I encourage you to read the article itself on Barron's. Thats my lame attempt at being fair to Barron's since I am copying their text on my blog. Anyway, without further ado:

• Clearly, this is Mark Zuckerberg's world we're all living in. The Facebook founder said the company has nearly completed its much-discussed next round of financing, though neither he nor Ballmer would say whether rumors that Microsoft will sink $500 million into the company are true. Zuckerberg also said the company is years away from going public, though I would note that two is a plural number; how about an IPO in 2009? I say that for a reason. Zuckerberg said the company has 300 employees now, and likely will have 700 in a year. He also said that it is likely that all employees will continue to receive stock. If that is true, it would appear the company next year will trigger an SEC provision requiring regular financial filings for companies with more than 500 shareholders and more than $10 million in revenue. The rule is that you have to start filing within 120 days of the end of the fiscal year in which you trigger the provision; it is hard to imagine that the company simply will start filing 10-Qs without at least raising some capital. That is exactly the dynamic that led to the Google IPO, in fact. So by that logic, I predict a Facebook IPO filing in April 2009.

$12.95

Do you like wearing glasses? I do not. Thankfully, it was never utmost necessary for me to wear glasses. See, my prescription is a mere -0.75 and -0.50 on the two eyes. This means I can get a driver's license w/o restrictions, I can read almost all that I need to from a respectable distance. I can get by with little trouble and no one ever suspects that I cannot see clearly from a distance. Yes, there is some trouble when I am seated in the very back row of a room and the presenter is particularly merciless to backbenchers. There is some trouble reading road names and road signs from a very long distance. But none of this ever bothered me. Despite my calm over my short sightedness, sometimes, I did get frustrated at not being able to see. On one such frustrating day, I went to lenscrafters to get my glasses made. The optometrist came back with the un-surprising result. She recommended me to use glasses if I want to - as usual. I looked at some of the frames they had on the wall. The frames I liked were close to $200 a pop. I asked the lady at the counter for lens options and found out that with anti-glare coating, anti-scratch coating and high-density lenses, my total expense would be close to $400 and then they would apply a discount to land me a pair of unnecessary see through holes in a metal frame for about $325. Sears optical had a buy one get one free and I could get something similar for $275 or $300. I decided, as usual, to drop the idea.
On a lark, I searched for the term "glasses" on google. The second link from the top (in the sponsored links) was Zenni Optical. This is the best e-commerce business to happen to folks who have prescription glasses! One look at the link will tell you what I mean. The cheapest glasses you can get from them costs - get ready for this - $12.95 shipped to your mailbox. The most expensive set with all the bells and whistles would probably be under $80. Now thats a bargain.
This website has a left hand side vertical panel that organizes its catalog with price, fashion and material with which the frames are made. The way you order is to first choose a frame from their catalog and then enter all information from your optometrist's prescription into the website. When I entered my info, there was no ambiguity on what was required. The terms used on this site and the terms on my lenscrafter prescription were exactly the same. The only metric missing was "pupillary distance". As you must have guessed, its the distance between your pupils when you re looking straight ahead. As per the website and as per wikipedia, the pupillary distance can be measured simply by holding a ruler in front of your eyes and getting a physical measurement in millimeters. You can be off the mark by as much as a couple mm or more - it is OK. Then you choose the lens type, any coatings you want and then you pay via credit card or whatever they accept and thats it. Just wait for the glasses to arrive in your mail. Mine came in a week. I am thrilled with what I got. For $12.95, I think the glasses I am wearing are a STEAL. The lens comes with anti-scratch coating, UV protection within the cost. Best part is that I am going to place an order for at least three more pairs. One for parties, one very light one for travel and the third one as an spare pair. I'll get an upgrade to 1.67 RI glass for $37 and a premium anti-reflective coating for $4.95. That will be just cool!
Here is some more very interesting reading on this topic: glassy eyes.