Employers in the Delaware Valley region received a brief word from Independence Blue Cross that they’d reached an agreement with the Crozer-Keystone system.

To our members who receive care through the Crozer-Keystone Health System

We are pleased to have agreed on terms for a new four-year contract with Crozer-Keystone Health System.

Our members may continue to receive care through Crozer-Keystone from the physicians they have come to know and trust. In addition, our members who have health plans that require a primary care physician will not need to change doctors. We would like to thank our customers, members, and the physicians serving patients at Crozer-Keystone for their patience and understanding during contract discussions.

We are committed to continuing to offer our members access to affordable, quality care through a broad network of hospitals, physicians and other health care services.

Christopher Butler
Chief Operating Officer
Independence Blue Cross

That a deal would be struck was a certainty. For each company, the possibility of losing the other’s customer base, even for a short while, was a form of mutually assured destruction.

No details of the deal have been made public. Consequently, the other shoe has yet to drop for the region’s employers and workers. If there’s a surprising rate hike at the next renewal period, we may well have an idea how these negotiations played out.

We took Pop Beard (my dad) to see the King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute yesterday. While the artifacts on display are undeniably gorgeous, I got hit hard by the hype curve and walked away feeling disappointed. (It should be noticed that the rest of the party did not feel this way. Your mileage may vary.)

The exhibit is paced so that you feel like you’re drawing closer and closer to a spectacular revelation of a final punctuating display of Tut himself. First you see artifacts from his ancestry, then items from the period of Akhentaten, who preceded Tutankhamun and is believed to be his father. Then we see an ornate coffinete, which had contained the mummified liver of Tutankhamun. The next hall contains artifacts found in Tut’s tomb: jewelry, shabti statues, a fan, a mace, etc. Finally, you come to a room which shows you items found inside his sarcophagus– a diadem, a dagger, a pectoral (necklace).

At the back of the room, there’s a sign that warns you that there will be no re-entry beyond this point. There was palpable anticipation. Surely this is the spot where we will see the famous death mask from the 1970’s exhibit, or an ornate coffin, something on a large scale to cap off the exhibit! There had been all these larger-than life images promoting the ornate gold visage of the young king.

Nope. It was the gift shop. There you can buy authentic treasures, like Tutankhamun baseballs.

Wish I’d read Jason Coyne’s review of the Tut exhibit before I went. I’m sure we still would have gone, but I would have calibrated my expectations accordingly.

If you’re not dissuaded, I have a few recommendations for those who follow in our footsteps:

1. The Golden Ticket promotion is a much better value than the regular admission. If you agree to go into the exhibit in off-peak hours, you will save a lot of money with the added bonus of being able to move about the exhibit with much less crowding. Regular exhibit entry costs $32.50 per person (plus Ticketmaster fees). For $25 a person, the Golden Ticket allows entry anytime after 4:00, plus a ticket to the IMAX presentation, Mummies, Secrets of the Pharaohs.
2. Admission to the Franklin Institute’s regular exhibits is also included in the package, but note that the rest of the museum closes at 5:00 PM. If you’re taking the kids, go to the museum early in the afternoon to enjoy the fun science exhibits before your movie and tour of the Tut galleries.
3. The Franklin Institute lot is always *&@#! full. There are a number of public lots along 23rd Street between Race and Arch.

I’m glad that the scientific evidence of global warming is finally gaining general acceptance and that there is increasing public interest in developing a response to the problem. What I don’t get is the current fad that my liberal friends are so fond of promoting these days. Several times, friends involved in environmental groups have asked me to sign up for a “clean energy” plan for our home.

I’m all for clean energy development, but I don’t understand why I should subsidize a for-profit utility company in developing its production capacity. If this is an essential requirement for long term energy security and environmental sustainability, I don’t consider it fair that only the small percentage of do-gooders should bear the costs while everybody else continues to burn fossil fuels at a discount. The incentives are entirely skewed in the wrong direction. Polluters (including me) should bear the true costs of their consumption, while virtue is rewarded.

As far as I can tell, these voluntary subsidy schemes don’t actually take existing power plants off-line. The power companies will have more capacity in the end, which they can continue to supply to their unconcerned customers at unnaturally low prices. At best, it controls a future increase in greenhouse gases, but it doesn’t actually reduce existing pollution.

The cost of sustainable energy should be underwritten by everybody on the grid. The path to a lower energy bill should be through conservation.

Ok, my progressive friends; rip me to shreds.

The two Southeastern PA behemoths of health care are locked in battle. Independence Blue Cross (IBX) and the Crozer-Keystone system (whose facilities the hospitals in Upland, Chester, Ridley Park, Springfield, and Drexel Hill) have been unable to reach a new contract agreement. The current contract expires on August 19th, so the bickering is spilling into the press. The disagreement centers, of course, on the reimbursement schedule for care provided to patients.

According to reporting from Patti Mengers of the Delco Times, 90,000 IBX customers were notified of the pending contract expiration. At this time, patients are already seeing some of the negative impacts of the looming deadline. Keystone HMO and Personal Choice customers cannot get approvals for elective care or procedures scheduled to take place after the deadline.

After months of negotiation, IBX has made its kinda-sorta-mostly final offer, and declared it fair. Per the Delco Times, Crozer-Keystone doesn’t agree.

Crozer-Keystone Health System Chief Executive Officer Joan K. Richards does not agree.

“Both parties have invested a lot of time and effort into the negotiations but, as of today, we have been unable to reach an agreement that covers the cost of caring for our patients,” Richards noted Monday in a prepared statement.

Both sides would be financially devestated to have the contract negotiations fail. (Mutually assured destruction?) The hospitals would find a third of its patients without network health coverage. And Independence Blue Cross would surely feel the wrath of employers and subscribers.

If there’s one event that can surely bring me joy, its one quasi-monopoly arguing with another quasi-monopoly about how to divvy up my insanely high insurance premiums. I’m sure that their resolution to the current impasse will be to pass along the costs to families whose health and welfare hangs in the balance.

Single payer starts to sound more and more attractive each year that my premiums rise at rates double or triple the rate of inflation.

Back in August, Verizon gave me the worst customer experience of my life. (If you really care, you can relive the horror here, here and here.) As of this moment, they’re officially getting none of our money. Frankly, our new VOIP solution is saving us about $45 a month, the quality is fine, and I have the satisfaction of not having to deal with that obnoxious, crappy customer “service” operation again. More »