Book Review: The New Health Insurance Solution by Paul Zane Pilzer

I wanted to actually try Mr. Pilzer’s suggestions before writing this but I just haven’t been able to get to it. I will post my results later when I have.

The biggest challenge this book presents is that you actually have to pay attention to your health insurance. This is something that I, and I’d say most Americans, have never really done. I have insurance through my employer. There’s something about a deductible and that’s about all I usually know.

Until something happens, that is. I really woke up to this when two things happened. I broke my thumb over the summer. This required surgery and follow up appointments which racked up quite a bill. In the end, the whole ordeal cost well over $5K! And, miraculously and somewhat mysteriously, my insurance paid all but $109. That’s all I had to pay.

Amazing.

Then in October I decided that I wanted to strike out on my own. I quit my job, set up a consulting business, and immediately started worrying about health insurance. For me, this detail is even more worrisome than taxes.

For the time being, we are on my wife’s insurance but frankly it’s not a very good plan and it’s quite expensive. I planned to find individual insurance as soon as I could anyway and now I feel a lot more confident about this process thanks to Pilzer’s book.

In the first place, this guy is excited about health insurance. I really have never encountered anyone with so much enthusiasm for this, to me, mind numbingly boring topic. His excitement really comes through in the book. Under most writers I wouldn’t make it two paragraphs into this subject before falling asleep. But Pilzer keeps the reader’s attention with his enthusiasm.

It also helps that the text is often interrupted with charts, text boxes, subheading, etc. All of this drags you along as he explains his rather simple solution to rising employer health care costs.

His solution, and I’m not spilling the beans on him here because it’s right there in the title, is to leave your traditional employer provided healthcare plan. He argues that things are such now that obtaining individual insurance is actually cheaper and can provide better coverage for healthy individuals than under the old system of employer provided insurance.

“Yeah, right,” you’re probably thinking. Conventional wisdom says that purchasing individual health insurance is cripplingly expensive. That’s what I believed when I saw the synopsis of this book. But Pilzer demonstrates how one can combine high deductible individual insurance with a new financial tool that Congress recently put into place called an HAS to make it work.

Like I said, I haven’t tried it yet myself but I will.

I sat down with this book and read it cover to cover but only because I planned to write this review. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone else nor would I do it myself if I were reading it for the first time. Even with the enthusiasm and attention grabbing format I mentioned above I found my mind wandering while I read it. This IS a book about health insurance, after all, and there’s only so much you can do with this subject.

And Pilzer apparently realizes this. Mercifully, the first section of the book, directly after the table of contents, is called “Executive Summary.” In it he presents almost every realistic health insurance scenario followed by a summarized solution and where you can find the specific details of his solution in the book. So in some ways this can be called a reference manual to Pilzer’s new health insurance solution.

And he doesn’t just cover individuals. There is quite a lot written for businesses about how they can take advantages of the new health insurance laws to cut their costs for health insurance. The most innovative approach was to educate employees about the cheaper solutions available to them for finding individual insurance then compensating them, before taxes, for their costs at a fraction of the overall costs associated with the traditional arrangement. Everybody wins.

So, if you have health insurance, need insurance or handle the insurance for your company, I recommend this book.

Book Review: The Soul of America by Abraham King

Do you know where the soul of America is? I do but I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to read the book.

Actually, this book is less concerned with America’s soul than those parts that have become separated from it. Specifically religion, business, politics, the workers – well, the whole country, I suppose - and each part is represented by a caricature designed for first time novelist Abraham King’s dissection and criticism.

The book opens and closes on a flea market – a nice device that prepares the reader for the messiness of all that will come. Surrounded as it is by the chaos of mounds of junk for sale and grubby customers rifling through old pots and pans, the book produces a futility for the characters as they try to enforce some sort of order to their life.

While each character desperately clings to whatever portion of the American pie he has gained, he is unaware of the ground crumbling beneath him. We are shown how the actions of each contribute directly to the decline of America. This demonstrates a perpetuation of power on the parts of both the powerful and powerless that vexes the entire novel.

The caricature studies begin with the militia man without a militia. He has a credo and an agenda but no followers. He is followed by two religious leaders, one who is slowly converting his church to a shopping mall and another who doesn’t really seem to have a church at all. We also meet the business tycoon whose entire existence is literally and necessarily spent at his desk as it contains the life support systems for his failing body. The working poor and the middle management employee help to round out this modern American morality play. Finally, the government overseeing this madness is run by amateurs trained by amateurs with no greater goal than to stay in office.

Anything here sound familiar? If there is a genius to King it is that he can take the ills intrinsic to the point of being familiar in modern American society and twist them through hyperbole so that we are reintroduced to their corrosive nature. He holds up a circus mirror to make us reexamine the evils that we have become used to.

This very act produces not only a chance to see the America with fresh eyes but many chances at humor. For all of the darkness here, there is a great deal of comedy. I found myself laughing aloud and while simultaneously horrified by book’s macabre twists.

You might have noticed, if you try to be a politically correct grammarian as I do, that I seem to have slipped into the now archaic method of referring generically to all persons with a masculine pronoun. This is not the case. Except for one or two minor characters, this book is devoid of women. I’m not sure if this is an oversight by the author or another of his many points regarding what is wrong with America today. Given Abraham’s taut metaphors, I tend to think the later.

This is really an entertaining book. The idea is well conceived and the characters, even if I can’t find myself caring for even the most sympathetic of them, are interesting enough to keep the pages turning.

But then this is a parable and who needs depth?

Book Review: Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright

Blog or die. That’s Jeremy Wright’s message to the modern business. He tells us that customers have come to expect a business to have a blog. And, even if a business doesn’t have a blog, they will still be blogged about so every person invested in the success of a business should follow its public image in the blogoshere.

This book was rather thicker than I thought possible given the subject of blogs. Blogs are places where anyone of any level or skill can trumpet their thoughts, opinions, or musings. What more could possibly be said about them?

Quite a lot, actually.

One point, though, before I get into this book. The title is a bit misleading perhaps. If you are a sales person or trying to market something, do not expect this book to do much to help you use blogs to move product. This book concerns itself with the big picture. Wright is more interested in using blogs to improve a businesses public image than for moving individual units.

The book opens with a couple of obligatory chapters for the uninitiated. This book is written to the businessman, not the blogger, and Wright provides enough background and examples to prepare his audience for the blogoshpere. Then he launches into the meaning of blogs to business. He covers the various possible uses – both internal and external – of blogs for businesses. Wright tells us that a blog is so much more than the traditional advertising or press release style of business to customer communication. That old monologue can be abandoned for the more productive dialogue that blogs make possible. They now have the opportunity to interact with customers in a way that they never could before. Blogs also offer new internal communication solutions to businesses, either company wide or within a department or even a few coworkers involved in a project.

Another invaluable use for of blogosphere to businesses that Wright points out is monitoring what other blogs are saying about your business and industry. Wright argues that this puts the decision makers in an unprecedented position of being able to move swiftly and react quickly to issues that might arise with such things as product malfunction, similar issues with competitors, problems with suppliers or vendors. The blogosphere discusses everything; therefore something worth knowing is bound to come up.

Next Wright offers a few pointers on how to interact with your business’s blog. Gone are the days, he repeats time and again, when businesses can speak down to their customers but never listen. He offers advice on dealing with praise and, most importantly, negative comments on the business’s or others’ blogs.

He wraps up the book with tips on how to succeed in blogging and even makes a few predictions for the future of blogging.

Throughout the book Wright maintains a passionate message that businesses simply must blog or they will quickly go the way of buggy whip makers. His message is so fervent that I felt that I need to start a business blog and soon! Better start a business first, though. Now that I’ve stepped back a bit, though, I really don’t know if I buy this message.

Undeniably, blogs can offer lots of advantages and conveniences to modern businesses. They are cheap, easy to maintain and offer a simple way to communicate that won’t have the IT department tied down with extra work. But blog or die? There is one fact that Wright overlooks. Bloggers do not represent the world. Bloggers, I mean consistent participants in the blogosphere, have different goals and expectations from companies than the population in general. Businesses can still succeed and will be able to indefinitely without maintaining a public blog.

This isn’t to diminish the importance of blogs. I just question the necessity of blogs to businesses that Wright maintains.

As a casual blogger myself, I found a lot of interesting and fascinating information in this book. From uses of the various and heretofore unimaginable tools that have sprung up around the blogging community to the blogs of top executives, I learned a lot from this book. If you are a dedicated blogged and pinging is old news to you, you probably won’t learn a lot from this book. If, like me, you have only a passing knowledge of the blog world or if you are considering adding a blog to your businesses profile, you’ll find some invaluable information in this book.

Jackasses with Bullhorns – Pat Robertson Vs. Hugo Chavez

People of every political color spoke up yesterday against Pat Robertson’s absurd utterance on his TV show, “The 700 Club” or as I like to call it, “Sit in Awe of Our Piety while You Watch Us Pray on TV.” And, of course, it was a silly thing to say. That’s not to say that we won’t do it, it’s just you don’t go out on the crazy limb until the government goes there first. Then Pat and every other meaningless mouth on TV can dance on that limb – debating their extreme sides of it.

Craziness, on the national level, is a very subjective thing. Think of the major issues being debated today and consider whether or not they would have seemed silly to even consider only a few years ago. Many would.

There’s a skill and a subtlety to floating the crazy balloon. First, you spend months softening the ground. Leak reports, testify before Congress and the UN, issue statements, and repeat. Keep repeating until even the subject matter is reduced to an acronym. When Jay Leno uses it in his monologue, you’re ready for the next step.

In this case, a debate should have been started months ago about whether or not we should explore the viability of eliminating leaders of oil producing empires. Reports should have been leaked about findings of the specific sins of these bastards; high ranking officials should have been sent before various national and world bodies with plenty of visual props to testify about the dangers of letting such leaders continue their frightening rule. Then when the White house press corps started asked about the issue, the press secretary could have let them know that those in the know are calling it ELOPE, short for Elimination of Leaders of Oil Producing Empires. So, when the conversation turned to specific people, it would have sounded so much better. It also makes the transition to late night talk shows that much easier. Just think of all the possible jokes about eloping.

Now the ground would have been soft. People would be ready to hear that we want to kill Hugo Chavez. Some would even be clamoring for it. Now Pat Robertson wouldn’t be a crazy shouting alone, he’d be the spokesman for the religious right taking a courageous position as the leader in a just cause. And it would sound so much better – “If Hugo Chavez is looking for a fight, maybe we should just elope him and save a few dollars on a full blown war!”

Is Pat really that inept? As he pointed out today this has really all been taken out of context and blown out of proportion. He explained that he never used the word assassination, he said “take him out” and, naturally that doesn’t exactly mean assassinate. It could mean kidnap or any number of other things.

Right Pat!

You probably don’t need to worry too much about spinning this one; the debate is probably in its last throes.

But I’ll give Pat the last word here. From his Monday broadcast: "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it…" (He’s right, he used a pronoun in assassination’s place. Whew, dodge the bullet on that one, didn’t you, Patty?)