Saturday

This looks like a great Fall day. I need to get outside once I'm done with a couple of things here at the office. My pal Roy and I may hit some balls.

The annual intra-city football clash between PV and Bettendorf was last night. It wasn't much of a clash. Bettendorf wins 49-0. Ouch! Amazing how the culture, at least for football, can be so different in schools two miles apart who are drawing from essentially the same gene pool. In most years, this is the kind of lop-sided result in this game. The net outcomes in all other sports between the schools are not nearly that disparate. Does one coaching staff make that big of a difference?

The annual Pumpkin Run is tomorrow on Credit Island in Davenport. I think that they have added a 10K for the more serious runners. Since 4 is in town for the weekend, maybe she and I can stop down and re-create that famous photo of our participation in the event years ago.

The next medico that I see is the colonoscopy guy. My first one was 6+ years ago, and I started getting reminder cards from the doc last Winter to schedule a re-check. Of course, I ignored those cards. As a third reminder, they sent me a certified letter advising me of their recommendation to schedule the procedure. I ignored that letter as well, although I was curious if their rationale for sending it by certified mail was legal liability motivated. A surgeon friend thought it was more profit-motivated than anything.

Since I have met all my insurance deductibles from the bike accident surgery, my own economics now push me down the road to do the colonoscopy before the end of the year to minimize my out-of-pocket costs. So I called the doctor's office yesterday to initiate the process. In my repartee with the appointment clerk, she fessed-up that the certified letter was a legal-liability protection action on advice from counsel. The lawyers must be working overtime to come up with not only the possible cases that they could file, but the corresponding defenses as well.

When you think about it, it's almost Seinfeld-esque in the sense that we're almost doing a game-theory thing. If you were a good doctor, you would have had a procedure to get the recently departed Mr. Doe back to your office for a re-check of his colon to catch the colon cancer that developed some time after that colonoscopy that you did seven years ago (that showed no signs of disease). So even though Mr. Doe ignored those suggestion cards that you sent him three years ago to come back for a routine follow-up, you didn't do enough, so his death is your fault, and we think that you now owe Mrs. Doe $2 million for malpractice. (Keeping in mind, of course, that the litigator keeps at least one-third of the award.)

As convoluted as that logic may seem, if plaintiff attorneys don't think like this, why would defense attorneys come up with the certified letter concept?

So do we have a guest author tomorrow? Perhaps some wisdom from C-town?

Have a great day.

BCOT