Hammer Mill Days

Huh. Still promoting the Christmas album, eh? Think that’s wise? I mean, it’s freaking May, man. What’s that? Okay. I’ll just stand over here, then, and not say anything. Oh, hi. I was just talking to our advertising manager, a Mr. Antimatter Abraham Lincoln, esq., who spent some time as a railroad lawyer, I hear, and has since moved into marketing and PR. Perhaps a bit less mentally challenging for him, I suspect. Anyway, Anti-Lincoln has some very passionate opinions about what works and what doesn’t work. Interestingly, they don’t appear to have anything to do with standard measures of success, like sales, cash flow, etc. I’m not sure what he’s measuring, frankly. In as much as he is an anti-matter being, it’s possible that the less successful something is, the more of a success he considers it to be. If that’s the case, then Big Green is on top of the world in his book. Yeah, trouble is … we’re on the bottom of the world in everyone else’s. I know, I know – th...

By rights, this should be an open letter to former Vice President Joseph Biden, a man who has nothing but good to say about employer-based health insurance. It actually dovetails fairly nicely with the first episode of my political podcast, Strange Sound , which was dedicated to that topic. As I mentioned therein, I am a subscriber to such a health plan – one of perhaps 170 million subscribers in the U.S., though that number has gone down by millions in recent weeks due to massive layoffs, furloughs, etc. I had cause to make considerable use of my coverage over the last month or so, and I am now experiencing the second wave of trauma that typically accompanies major illness in the United States: medical billing. I’ll preface this with a brief “explanation of benefits”, as they say in the insurance game. I have what is known as a high deductible plan: health coverage that carries a $3,600 annual deductible, which means that I pay for the first $3,600 in medical charges, wi...