n a t h a n

jayparkinsonmd:

Remember when Lasik surgery burst onto the consumer market? The small amount of docs who were performing the “surgery” charged a super hefty premium - damn it was expensive! Then, damn near every ophthalmologist jumped onto the bandwagon and introduced competition in health care! Now, it’s advertised based on price and even quality measures. And guess what? Prices have come down. Because when you force individual doctors to compete against one another a funny thing happens. They compete on price and quality and magically prices come way down.

You can see this in dermatology, cosmetic surgery, and opthalmology. Anything that appeals to our vanity, prices are kept in check. They start advertising. They start doing their jobs better because their livelihood depends on it. They even start advertising how awesome they are with the numbers to back it up.

And anytime we have to spend our own money on health care, prices are kept in check. But the vast majority of our health care system depends on us spending someone else’s money, stripping us of “customer” status. And since we’re not the customers, doctors don’t treat us like customers with proper customer service, transparent, competitive pricing, and high quality services.

There is hardly any competition in the health care industry right now. If a system is set up where every health care service is like Lasik or boob jobs, I think we’d start seeing some monumental changes in health care prices. Because right now, the big players are laughing all the way to the bank and bleeding our economy drier than the bones it already is.

Jay Parkinson is smart.

Now that gas has dropped below $2/gallon, I thought it might be interesting to look back at how much my sister and I paid when we drove across the country in May.

awesomeroadtrip:

per gallon:

$3.89 - Fishers, IN 

$3.84 - Troy, IL 

$3.65 - Vinita, OK 

$3.69 - Clinton, OK 

$3.89 - Vega, TX 

$3.63 - Albuquerque, NM 

$3.69 - Holbrook, AZ 

$3.79 - Kingston, AZ 

$4.39 - somewhere in the Mojave Desert 

$3.89 - Los Angeles, CA (Brentwood)

I spoke with my grandfather today about about the proposed auto bailout. He has been a car dealer for almost 30 years, selling and servicing General Motors products in a small town in northeast Indiana.

When I was in high school, I spent my summers working for him, washing cars, helping in the accounting department and picking up every cigarette butt on the lot.

My uncle runs the dealership now, and my grandfather marveled today about how his son managed to actually make money in November when almost every other dealer lost it.

They only sold 12 new cars in the entire month, but made up for it by selling 92 used vehicles.

My grandfather said that business is already picking up in December. (They had already sold three new trucks this morning.) Like many dealerships in smaller towns, his employs a lot of people from the community and supports many local organizations, and because of them I hope his business continues to improve.

Of all the neighborhoods in Los Angeles, mine is one of the best to spot celebrities, and over the last few years, I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing them. The key is to remember that they never look exactly like they do on TV or in the movies. (That’s why so many celebrities have people come up to them and say, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like __________?”)

Here’s how it usually works: as you get closer to the blonde girl walking towards you on the sidewalk, you think to yourself, “That girl kind of looks like Reese Witherspoon.” A few seconds later, as she walks past you, you realize that it is Reese Witherspoon.

Or you’re walking down another sidewalk and a man comes out of the coffee shop just as you pass. He looks familiar, but it isn’t until a few steps later that you realize you almost ran into Christopher Guest.

Tonight, however, I had the easiest celebrity sighting of my celebrity sighting career. Walking down the sidewalk (yes, I do a lot of walking, and most of it takes place on the sidewalk), I saw a man and woman having a conversation perhaps 30 feet away. They were standing underneath a large fluorescent light, putting both of them in silhouette. Ordinarily, this would be an impossible circumstance to spot a celebrity, but there was no mistaking the identity of man, thanks to his height, long appendages and perfectly coiffed pompadour: Conan O’Brien.  

I’m a big fan of his work, but he doesn’t qualify as my favorite celebrity sighting. That happened two summers ago at the Subway down the street. My friend Mike and I were ordering a sandwich when the old man eating outside came in to use the bathroom. It turned out he wasn’t just any old man, he was Peter Falk.

Columbo.

“Restroom?” he asked the woman fixing our sandwiches.

“We don’t have one,” she told him.

He turned to leave, disappointed. In my mind, he took one step towards the door, turned back around and said, “Uh…just one more thing,” in perfect Columbo style.

Instead, he went outside to find another place to pee.

I’m almost finished reading the best book about how movies are made I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a lot), Peter Biskind’s “Down and Dirty Pictures.” It recounts how Miramax and the Sundance Film Festival changed the movie business over the last twenty years.

My favorite story from the book is about the development of Good Will Hunting, which Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote to jump start their acting careers the same way Sylvester Stallone had with Rocky. Their script was originally bought by Castle Rock, Rob Reiner’s production company, at the urging of filmmaker Richard Linklater, who had a deal with the company. (Affleck had appeared in Linklater’s most recent film, Dazed and Confused.)

When a studio or production company buys a script, they hardly ever go shoot that version. Instead, as part of the deal, the writer is expected to do rewrites based on notes from the company’s development executives. This process continues until they decide to make the movie or lose interest in it and put it in turnaround, at which time other companies can buy it from them, is how Miramax eventually ended up with Good Will Hunting.

Before that happened, Damon and Affleck had started to suspect that the people at Castle Rock weren’t even reading the rewrites they were turning in, so they put in a scene where the psychiatrist character (eventually played by Robin Williams) gives Will Hunting a blow job in his office.

From the book:

Recalls Affleck, “Nobody at Castle Rock ever said anything to us about it, and we were like, ‘All right, I guess the blow job scene works.’”