Dear Everyone,
Thanksgiving is over.
Four days (plus) of overeating and game boarding. As for eating, Wednesday everyone was at Gail’s
(Salmon, quinoa salad, and a lot of whiskey), Thursday at Barbara’s (Turkey
X3), our house on Friday (vegetarian chili and shepherd’s pie), and Gail’s again
on Saturday for Lou Malnati’s pizza. AS far as board games, I think the big hits
were Code
Name and Hanabi. The partying really started the Saturday
before Thanksgiving, at the end of the Investment Committee meeting. Strangely, there was a blizzard going on at
that exact time that day, and I had to turn my car around at O’Hare. Traffic was going about 15 miles an hour, and
there were pickups and 18-wheelers spinning out and fishtailing everywhere (only
a slight exaggeration, it did take me about 2 hours to drive 30 miles, though).
I had to work the Saturday immediately after Thanksgiving,
and it was pretty dreadful. The last
quarter always seems to be the worst, with everyone trying to fill up their
insurance at the last moment. I think I
had about 20% more cases that I usually get on a heavy Saturday. Because of the rhythm of the histology lab,
it seems that Saturday has become one of the heavier work load days to begin
with. I have decided unilaterally to
start leaving early on Friday afternoons (when we get almost no new cases), and
going in for 90 minutes on Saturday before my Tai Chi class to help out the
other pathologist. Maybe I can get some
of the other people to follow my lead.
We did have our annual partner’s meeting this week, and we
talked about our pension investments (slight underperformance), and the fact
that, as usual, the government (and by extension, the private insurers) are
going to pay us less money for the same work next year. One big worry is a new
policy opening up by Blue Cross that will be the cheapest on the market. It’s an HMO and the participants will have to
stay within the gargantuan Advocate network.
So far so good - - cheap for the patient, a huge network of physicians
for patients, and an increase in volume for Advocate. However, part of the HMO plan is that Blue
Cross won’t pay for a significant portion of the Clinical Pathology costs. Ouch.
I think we will all be pretty happy if our incomes don’t decrease next
year. We are also still waiting (over a
year now) to see if the federal Trade Commission is going to approve the merger
between Advocate and North Shore Health.
I have heard both pro and con merger in the rumor mill at work. We will
see soon. The new hospital tower at
Christ is going to open in about a month, and they have started to give
physicians tours of the new building.
All I know so far is that the morgue and archived slides and tissue
blocks are moving over there. When it is
complete, we will certainly be one of the top three largest hospitals in
Chicagoland, maybe the largest.
Last night Cindy and I went with the Wallochs to a salon
hosted by Dr. Nancy Church and her husband Charles
Jett. Nancy is an OB/Gyn, but this
is her second career, previously she was a sculptor. Mr. Jett is her second husband. He was a naval Academy graduate who was the first
nuclear engineer on one of the US Navy’s first fast attack subs in the 1960s,
the USS Ray. He’s is the man that developed the technique
used in ‘The Hunt for Red October’ (the geoplot). After the Navy he went to Harvard Business
School, and he has spent a lot of his career afterwards as a consultant. I have read a couple of his books, one I
liked especially was “The Doom Loop” (You might want to check out his blog, http://thedoomloopblog.com/). He has just written a history of his years in
the navy, called something like “Super Nuke”, which is awaiting approval from
the DoD (it is likely to get it, since two of his classmates were 4-star
admirals, and one of his friends was the Secretary of the Navy). The salon was held in the rooftop multiuse
room of an apartment building on State Street and Goethe, about one block away
from Isidore’s place on Astor. They are
moving out in a month - - apparently they had some deal on the real estate taxes
for the first seven years, but they balloon up something like X10 next
year. So, they will move somewhere
nearby and get another similar deal. I
don’t see how this benefits anyone except for the realtors.
Love, H
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