GameUtopia

With all this Health Care Reform in the news lately I can't help wondering a little about how much all these Doctors, tests, x-rays, scans, etc. costs. Do they really need to charge as much as they do? In recent years the prices have skyrocketed to say the least.

Here where I live a few years ago one could expect to pay $100-$125 for a standard family doctor office call. For some reason after a brand new facility was built where a lot of these Doctors practice at the fee jumped to $180-$225 for the same standard family doctor. Coincidence? I wonder if the brand new facility had something to do with it.

Same with a CT scan for example. Not to long ago it cost $800-$1000 now it costs almost $3000! I know these CT machines are very expensive, but I have a feeling at that price they will pay for it the first couple of months of operation or less.

It just amazes me how these things can go up so much in such a short amount of time, yet most normal people's wages don't go up anywhere near this amount or rate.

Medical seems to be the most drastic jump, but others have gone up considerably too.

Take the car mechanic for example. Not long ago I was paying $35-$40 per hour for labor. Now I am paying $60-$80 per hour for the same mechanic. This is ridiculous. The car makers don't help either with the way they build cars these days. They make cars in a way that the mechanic has to spend an hour removing other parts just to get to the part he or she needs to fix. Then, another hour putting the parts they had to remove back together. So the 30 minute repair, ends up taking 2 1/2 hours and costing me $150 to $200 in labor alone and that is figuring low in terms of time.

I am starting to get a little irritate and tired of hearing about all this health care reform stuff. Every day there seems to be some kind of new fight or argument. I highly doubt that they will come up with something that will benefit everyone, and most likely it will help only a small group. I think we do need some kind of reform, but it seems like it keeps changing and is getting a little out of hand. I'll continue to follow this for now.

Well here it is the end of August already. The kids will be heading back to school soon. Just seeing the back to school sales on TV makes me cringe. This summer sure did go by quick. I am not exactly ready for winter yet. I know there will still be some nice weather yet before it's over, but I can't help thinking about it.

It sure would be nice to live somewhere that has nice warm weather all year, but usually those types of places get too darn hot in summer time. I don't know if there is a perfect year around place in terms of weather. If I could find one, would there actually be jobs there? Or even something to do for that matter?

Wishful thinking and dreaming I guess. No harm in dreaming!

I am a huge fan of Firefox web browser. I think it is much faster than Internet Explorer. The free add-ons available for Firefox cannot even closely be matched by any other. No matter what you might be looking for there is probably an add-on for it.

Firefox 3.5 recently went stable so being a huge fan I decided to upgrade and check it out. There are some plenty of new features as expected. Firefox claims a huge increase in speed and performance, enhanced security, and a number of others.

After using Firefox 3.5 for more than a month now I do like it. However, there are some glitches or annoyances that irritate me quite a bit.

1. Speed and performance is great at first, but over time as the database increases in size the speed and performance slows...a lot actually.

2. When I have several tabs open at the same time and I click a link on a site, sometimes it closes the tab and opens the link / site in a totally new window. This is really annoying, and happens several times per week.

3. Oftentimes I choose open a new tab and go to punch in a site and the first few letters of the site I type get cut off. I end up re-typing the web address. It appears that the new tab is hanging and doesn't really kick in until I have typed a few letters, hence cutting off a few.

4. Sometimes I open a new tab and type in the address bar and nothing I typed appears. I have to click in the address bar and re-type the web address again. This happens often.

5. It consumes a lot of ram, and it continues to rise until I totally close all tabs and windows.

These are the top 5 complaints I have. I didn't have these issues in the previous version of Firefox. Only since upgrading.

Also when I upgraded Firefox wiped all of my bookmarks. It didn't suggest or tell me to back them up first. It was almost like it was a fresh install. Kind of like it removed the previous version and install the new.

I do keep fairly up-to-date backups, but I'm sure many don't and would end up losing all of their bookmarks.

All my custom bookmarks on the tool bar also disappeared when upgrading to Firefox 3.5 which was a little bit disappointing too.

At any rate Firefox is still my number 1 choice web browser.

Hopefully...maybe...fingers crossed...some of these issues will be addressed as new updates come out.

I keep hearing all this positive energy about the economy recovering. Unless it's happening everywhere except where I live or something I haven't noticed any improvement.

Maybe it is so slight that it is almost transparent. Or maybe it's the big boys in Washington trying to sweet talk us. Who knows. I think it will be quite a while yet, and don't expect any major changes for the good any time soon yet.

It sure would be nice if someone came up with a faster paced plan to get us out of this mess soon. Things just seem to be going so slow, it's discouraging to a lot of people including myself.

Ok enough rambling on about the economy for one night!