Ah, you're just a youngling. :-)

What you say is correct and absolutely believe that physician should be paid for necessary work. However, EHR systems also facilitate the performance of extra work for the sole purpose of being able to bump the E&M (i.e., office visit) code to the next pay level.

The problem with your scenario is that that extra 5% is *not* necessary to the care of the patient and is done simply to be able to charge a higher fee. That, my friend, is certainly fraud. Your charity analogy is not relevant here. You can give *your* money to whomever you wish, but the money here is *not* yours. It comes from someone else. A better analogy would be someone who is paid by the hour "checking a few additional things" simply to get the time over the pay hump. Would *you* be OK with that if you were paying?

If a procedure can legitimately be coded in multiple ways, then as the payer I would certainly pay you for the least expensive code regardless of the code you billed me for. That should be agreeable to you since it is also playing by the same rules.

The notion of a naturally free market is an unrealistic utopian idea akin to that of communism. It sounds really great on paper or in words, however, it will never actually appear in the real world due those pesky things called human beings. They just refuse to operate according to the theory.

Go figure.

It's not a question of guilt or innocence, Zimmerman is guilty of shooting and killing Trayvon Martin. That is not in question at all. The question is whether he was legally justified in doing so. Unfortunately, one side of the story (Trayvon) has been removed and cannot be heard.

A human being *died*. A young man was shot and killed while bearing only a can of iced tea and a bag of skittles. An investigation of more than simply accepting the word of the shooter is definitely warranted.

>
> "Nice" isn't a business model. It's hardly even a worthwhile adjective.
>

Egad, I would *never* wish to have any sort of dealings, business or social, with you. "Nice" are all of those things which are not strictly required but can make all the difference between a pleasant experience and a poor one.

Of course, iTunes, is NOT proprietary in any way, nor is the format of the information managed by it. Apple freely provides the necessary information for non-Apple programs/devices to do similar functions.

So, your iGadget is not locked to software? You can freely connect it to another gadget which contains NO Apple software and actually move things back and forth?

What about the mag-safe connector, the iPod connector, keyboard, etc? These are not proprietary? What about the standard USB?

Without software from Apple?

If Apple is not THE middle man, the please explain where you get the apps if it is not via Apple's store. Having only ONE store certainly places Apple in the middle.

CUPS was developed long before Apple bought it. Have you ever tried doing something in CUPS on OSX that is easily possible on CUPS in Linux? CUPS on OSX is some kind of franken-CUPS.

Before Apple bought CUPS there was a CUPS aware printer driver available for Windows. That was great, one printer driver for just about everything. Sigh, that hasn't been updated since the purchase and the old driver no longer works with CUPS. Not exactly an advancement.

All about you is it?

Screw the rest of the folks who might like to homeschool but can't because they actually have to work so that their kids can have a place to live.

Perhaps your rant applies in *your* world, but it certainly doesn't apply in mine. The company I work for has been using OpenOffice.org quite happily for years. It does everything we need to do. We've integrated it into a majority of our workflows. We've felt no loss from not having either Microsoft Office or even Windows. Yeah, we're a double conundrum. We're a long-term successful business who doesn't use Microsoft Office or Windows. And we're not even a remotely IT-related business, nor are most of our employees computer experts.

In short, I think you are completely full of it.

This was the SCA virus.