A few weeks ago, I posted an account of my trials and tribulations with Blue Cross Blue Shield Horizon of New Jersey. Well now it is high time for an update, an update I think readers of this blog will be interested in because it tells a fascinating story about the Internet, blogging, and perhaps new uses of Google Alerts.

My goal in writing the post was to inform readers of their options when faced with problems caused by their health insurance company. Well, I had no idea a response would arrive from Blue Cross Blue Shield, and so quickly. For within 2 hours of posting my blog entry, the Public Relations Director of Blue Cross Blue Shield of NJ wrote me an email, which basically said that he “came across my blog posting” and was offering his assistance.

Needles to say, I was shocked. After months of getting some of the worst customer service I have ever received (when on the phone with Blue Cross, I always felt like I was talking to smarmy collection agency reps), I get an email from upper-level management, offering his assistance.

At first, I thought some of my geek readers were playing a practical joke on me. While it seemed plausible that Blue Cross monitors links to their site, and probably do so with Google Alerts, I had a harder time believing that the Director of Public Relations would fire off an email to me, directly.

Naturally, following the arrival of his message in my inbox, a small glimmer of hope flickered, especially after he had someone from the Appeals Department contact me. And this small intervention had a large noticeable effect: decent and transparent customer service became a reality, for the very first time. Instead of interactions that were opaque and frustrating, I finally had ones that were crystal clear and intelligible.

According to the main Blue Cross Blue Shield Web Site, they pride themselves on “Blue Distinction:”

“Blue DistinctionSM is the Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies’ nationwide program that will create an unprecedented level of transparency with two goals: engaging consumers to enable more informed healthcare decisions and collaborating with providers to improve quality outcomes and affordability.”

The contrast of my service before and after having the Public Relations director contact me speaks volumes to the actual nature of “Blue Distinction” as it pertains to BCBS of NJ. For most of my interactions with Blue Cross Blue Shield, I encountered an unprecedented level of opaqueness and frustration until there was intervention from high-above.

I actually appreciated the service I received and saw it as a laudable move. Unfortunately, the outcome has been far from my liking. I recently got word they are not paying up for any of the dermatological services. So perhaps the fact that a PR person contacted me was significant because in the end, it has panned out as a typical PR move: all gloss and lacking substance.

What now? I am moving to an internal BCBS appeal process and if that does not work, I will move on to small claims court in NYC and perhaps a more organized web campaign. In the mean time I have basically have decided to blog about the process so look out for future updates!

$ 5000 medical bill (that insurance won’t pay for)
$ 450 water bill in Puerto Rico
$ 150 library fine for one lost book that normally costs under 20 dollars

Anxiety and rage from dealing with these ludicrous bills: priceless.

Ok seriously I am now dealing with these three things and it has been really really really unpleasant. I sometimes wonder if I was once a bad as* Roman tax collector by the name of Biella Plebius and now, reincarnated as Biella Coleman, I am suffering the karmic consequences of extorting people in the 3rd century A.D.

Other times I take a lighter approach to all of this and console myself that if nothing else, I am learning a lot. For example, as I had mentioned awhile back, Blue Cross Blue Shield Horizon of New Jersey is stalling and denying health insurance bills for my mole surgery. Because I had a pre-existing clause in my contract, they are trying to squirrel out of it. However, since I never had a pre-existing issue with moles, I am pretty sure they are required to pony up the cash but getting them to do this has been a Herculean, no Sisyphean task.

Since it was clear they were not going to pay if I alone was applying pressure, I was about to file a claim in Special Civil court (the bill is too high for small claims court) but I wanted to see if I had any other options. So hours and hours after diligent web research, I finally found on lawyers.com that I can file a complaint against my health insurance via the Department of Banking and Insurance. I am amazed that NO ONE in the doctor’s office, including those whose only job is to deal with health insurance, had a clue about this option.

And even when you go to the Dept of Insurance website it is not totally obvious that you can file a complaint (it is under the “file for assistance” category). But once I got in touch with them, they have been incredibly helpful.

Now, my detailed complaint letter is with them, and some other documentation and apparently they have an investigator on the case. I am not sure if this route will be enough pressure to get the job done but at least by the time this is over, I will be in the greater NY area so that I can move to the court option.

The take away lesson here is that if you are having any trouble with claims and health insurance, do do do do file a complaint with your state Department of Banking and Insurance. This is a great first option to use.

I just received a fund raising email from Lawrence Lessig who is trying to raise money to support the isummit conference to be held in mid-June in Croatia. The goal is to raise $ 100,000 which will be matched by some anonymous donor.

I hope that they are also trying to meet the challenge of getting a few ladies on board as keynote speakers because so far they don’t even have one and there are barely any as workshop organizers. Oh hey, but at least someone noticed on their website.

Along with the cash, maybe they need to raise some “awareness.” I know I sound like a broken record when it comes to this issue, but the record is broken…

The online journal re-public: re-imagining democracy has a handful of articles on collaboration and wikipedia, adding to two special issues on reimagining the commons.

Many are good.

But I am disturbed over the true paucity of diverse voices, including women. The recent slew of articles does not have even one authored by a woman and there are only 2 represented in the re-imagining the commons special issues.

Given that there are many woman researchers and practitioners who do work on this material, I honestly don’t think this represents a lack but a problematic oversight. Problematic most especially because they are “re-imagining democracy,” and this does not look to imaginative to me.

I just got back from 4S, which happens to be one of my favorite of the “large” professional association conferences. Ok, 15 minutes to deliver talk is the equivalent of being treated as canned sardines, and thus totally unpleasant, but I feel like I can go to most any talk and find it relevant or interesting to my own work. I t is certainly more manageable too in terms of size than something like the AAAs which also gives you a paltry 15 minutes to present and worse, the association has been treading in some ethically problematic territory lately, so much so, I would rather throw my money to the other AAA.

While in Vancover, my Internet access was near to nothing (I was staying with a friend who I have not seen since the summer of 2002, but alas, thanks to chatting we have been in pretty consistent contact). When I came back I came across some discouraging but not so surprising new news on the AAA and their cowardly decision to fight the FRPAA that would mandate open access for articles derived from federally funded research… The cherry on top of the cake was they dissolved the AnthrSource Steering Committee formed precisely to figure out how to open up access, no less!

Alex Golub, a Savage Minds blogger, and a now ex-member of AnthroSource committee has written an excellent roundup of the story (link above) and Peter Suber, also has two very nice summaries, including links to the appropriate documentation.

This year since I am curtailing my time on the conference circuit, I decided not to go to the AAA conference because frankly I am totally annoyed with the professional organization. I am usually quite proud to be or at least amused after I tell folks that I am am anthropologists (most react as if I had decided to embark on some real courageous path) but I am quite embarrassed about the association that is supposed to represent my interests and the profession at large.

The links on SM point to and flesh out the problems with AAA’s refusal to jump on an exciting opportunity to free up some knowledge but I want to just emphasize three of the most problematic parts of their decision:

1.The most offensive part is that in reality the proposed bill is quite conservative in so far as it only asks for what should already be (a) given. That is, if the government is using tax dollars to fund research, it has every right to demand the fruits of such scholarship is made available to tax payers. Right? Given the neoliberal moment we are in, in which the government is retrehcnhing on all sorts of supports, this bill is admirable and I am afraid that if it does not pass it can be easily used by conservatives to justify future cuts of such funds. And given the very uncontroversial nature of the bill, it is not surprising that so many of the social science and humanities associations did not protest the bill… Anthropology sticks out as a sore sore thumb in fact.

2. The AAAs deployed FUD tactics to justify their position saying that open access would jeopardize peer review… Sigh. That is just so off the mark and the AnthroSource steering committee letter addressed this point well.

3. Many anthropologist know first-hand how appalling access outside of Europe, US, Australia, Japan etc, can be, even for academics and thus, AAA’s lack of support for this is also implicitly sanctions the “North” “South” Division that have plagued the field and all of academia so long. And for a field that has often been very thoughtful about these power/knowledge dynamics, it is doubly even more stinging… Is there really such a strong disconnect between the association and discplinary ethical currents?

Though I have lived inland for many years, I identify quite closely as an ocean person. Many of my weekends as a kid were spent sculpting houses with the sand, and being thrown around by the waves. Later I got to spend time living on a boat and I knew that one day I would return. A Primevial Tide of Toxins makes me wonder if my plan to retire on a boat in 30 years will even be possible.

In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Anthropologists all fear two related things: that we won’t collect any interesting data and if we then proceed to do so, one day it will vanish either in flames, following a computer break down, or theft. This fear perhaps used to be more acute before the digital era, when pen and paper were your only recourse to inscription. One copy in existence meant that if it was lost, well, you were in deep trouble (except if you are Edmund Leach and
Max Gluckman who also lost their field notes for projects and look where that GOT THEM ) Since the photocopy machine, copies could be made and with the computer, multiple copies and backups can be secured.

But there are new dangers for losing data in the golden age of computing having to do with a piece of technology that hackers love to loathe, Digital Rights Management which is usually not the prime concern of anthropologists, but of geeks and other netizens.

However, it is something that anyone who uses digital technologies for data gathering and recording, should really care about. The story below is from a fellow University of Chicago anthro grad student whose data was lost through a hard drive crash. He of course made backups, like any sensible person should do. But since he had to transfer the backups to a new computer, the hardware does not recognize it, being that it can only be used on the original harddrive where it was first placed. Below is the full story. If anyone is interested in cracking this format, or any solution, don’t hestitate to email me as this person is still actively looking for soltutions to this problem.

The story is basically as follows. I’ve been using a Sony Minidisc to record interviews and various other events for the past year, for my dissertation fieldwork. After recording anything, I would come home, transfer the files from the Minidisc onto my laptop, back them up on a CD, and just for safety also on a secure server. I would then delete them from the minidisc. About two weeks ago my HD crashed, looks like a mechanical problem. It would just go dead or restart a few moments after being turned on. A couple of times it lasted just long enough in windows to let me see that the files were all still there, and even open a couple. At a computer lab here they first formatted it, because I told them I had all my important data backed-up, which I thought I did. They realized then it was beyond redemption, and installed a new HD instead. I still have the old one, but it’s now both a mechanical problem and the discs being formatted. After re-installing everything on my new HD and recovering all my backups, I imported the audio files into SonicStage 3.2, which recognized them and added them to it’s library, but wouldn’t let me play them or do anything with them. The files are in Sony ATRAC3 and ATRAC3-Plus formats, with .oma and .omg endings. SonicStage either tells me the there is invalid rights management information in the OpenMG content (for .omg files), or first asks me whether I would like to connent to the internet to download the license for the content, and then gives me the message about invalid rights information (for .oma files). Another program, HiMDRenderer, which can convert ATRAC3 files into wav, also doesn’t let me convert the files or access them in any way. Audio I’ve recorded with the minidisc and imported into my computer after installing the new hard-drive works fine – I can listen to it in SonicStage or convert it to wav. I also tried installing the atrac codec and use sndrec32 to play it, but this won’t work either. In internet forums I’ve seen other postings of people who had similar problems, it seems like the Digital Rights Management system only allows certain files to be played on the original computer, and renders them unreadable elsewhere.

Oh wow. It is painful. I am revisiting my least favorite chapter and there is little joy in tightening a few screws when the screws don’t fit so snugly. It feels a little fruitless, sort of like sparc hacking but perhaps a little worse.

Because Yale has refused to renew the two year teaching contract for David Graeber, an anthropology professor, students are organizing on his behalf, calling for the University to re-hire him. The petition-letter is short, and all the more powerful because of it. They cut to the chase:

What we all share is an admiration for David’s work linking scholarly research to leadership and action in the wider world. In recognition of his contributions to the Yale community and to the wider scholarly community, we strongly urge Yale University and the Yale University Department of Anthropology to take all steps necessary to ensure that David Graeber continues to remain a member of the faculty of the Yale Department of Anthropology.

Undoubtedly the administration and the faculty see him as political nuisance. He is known for his unflagging political commitment, work, and organizing. He has written profusely about them, and in ways that are humorous, clear and accessible; I taught
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology in my hacker class this year, and it profoundly challenged most students in the class. Even those uncompelled by his critique of capitalism, nonetheless, respected his arguments, largely because of his honesty, clarity, and wit. We need more scholars willing to cross the bridge between activism and the academy, political labor and mental labor, but they can only do so with steady employment. If you know David, or his work and support it, support the petition.

So terror is among us. We know this, Bush has told us. But because terror is with us, we must terrorize others, in ways, that are clearly illegal. As reported in the New York Daily News, the abuse of detainees is not ordinary, but extraordinary, much more pervasive that we may think.

It is more than disquieting, and it makes me wonder what ideological justifications are used by abusers to mask the effects of what they are doing. Sometimes, I think they probably rely on some relational logic. Like what we are doing is not so bad, because these prisoners remain alive and with very few visible bruises. In other “nations” there is “real abuse.”

Something like the logic of “this torture is like diet coke, diet terror, really not so bad, even if it leaves a bitter aftertaste…” Sometimes, however, we find out only much later, that the diet was way worse than the real thing, in part because we could never point to the “reality” of what is out there……