More Doctors Dump UnitedHealthCare

The bad news keeps getting worse for UnitedHealthCare insurance subscribers. Last week Kelly’s OBGYN, Kamm, McKenzie, Harden, Smith, Bass. Marston, and Saacks, PLLC, dropped UnitedHealthCare as an insurance partner. The practice does all of its deliveries at WakeMed, and since UHC dropped WakeMed from its coverage it left Kamm, McKenzie with little choice but to drop UHC. A coworker reported his wife’s OBGYN has done the same.

Today we received notice from UHC that Wake Radiology, another practice closely aligned with WakeMed, is no longer honoring UHC insurance. Wake Radiology is where I got my latest CT scan performed – just last month, actually. Count it all up and its clear that my UnitedHealthCare insurance has made itself worthless to me.

I’m beginning to think that UHC’s idea of a well-run hospital is Walter Reed. In an effort to “control health care expenses,” perhaps UHC could trim the eye-popping golden parachutes it provides its departing executives through backdated stock options before shaking down fine hospitals like WakeMed.

Bastards.

Ubuntu: Linux For Humans

Being that I had a laptop around that needed an OS, I figured I’d try out Ubuntu, the Debian-based Linux distribution, on a regular basis.

Boy do I love it! It seems to be speedier than the Fedora systems that I’m used to using. Ubuntu’s UI is Gnome-based and has been designed with simplicity in mind. There’s a KDE-based version of Ubuntu, too, if you’re a KDE person.

I’m also quite pleased with Ubuntu’s use of the apt package manager. I only started tolerating Red Hat RPMs with the use of yum, but yum has its own quirks and can be described as a hack to a hack.

My main beef with Debian was the difficulty of installing it. Ubuntu seems to polish that up considerably – it even runs on a live CD. Not only that, but you can install the complete OS from that one CD. Amazing.

If you’ve been meaning to check out Linux, you can’t go wrong by downloading Ubuntu. You might never go back!