I Told You So.

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But did anybody listen? Nooooooooooooooooo.

And so it begins: Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin has proposed a budget for the new year. Gov. Shumlin is a “Big-D” Demorat but one who won’t raise taxes. Gov. Shumlin’s budget increases the provider tax on Vermont’s hospitals by $17.4 million.

A “provider tax” ain’t a real tax, right?

The gov says this increase will simply “maximize the draw down” of matching Federal Medicaid dollars to help fill the State’s budget shortfall. It will tax hospitals, physicians, Home Health Agencies, and pretty much any other healthcare providers. Probably even WalMart because they (used to be able to) sell prescriptions for $4 which makes them a provider.

“Hey, Dick! I get my scrips from Wally now,” Raul Garcia told me. “Did you know that some of the stores charge me sales tax on them some of the time. Some don’t.” Mr. Garcia is North Puffin’s best known hypochondriac and was our most respected grant writer until that little trouble with the Feds. He ended up serving 18 months of a four year sentence for fraud after he used the $4 million he “borrowed” from a major pharmaceutical company as the matching funds for an $8 million corporate gene splicing study at North Puffin College of Veterinary Medicine. The Pharma got their “investment” back when the grant came in. It wasn’t the first time. Even so, he says he has not yet determined which phase of the Moon determines the sales tax boondoggle.

Back on point. Northwestern Medical Center is a small, friendly, not-for-profit, hospital in St. Albans, Vermont. In the interest of full disclosure, I served on the Board of Incorporators for NMC for more than a decade. This regional, primary care facility offers a broad range of high-tech medical equipment and services to the area.

For that one local hospital’s privately insured patients, the added tax means sharing an increase of $350,000 in tax expense alone in the coming year. Yeppers, ObamaCare is gonna reduce the cost of medicine.

And Gov. Shumlin is right at the forefront of that reduction. Newspeak. Word.

No small town hospital is more vital to the community and none is better liked. NMC has earned national Avatar awards for the last three years for patient satisfaction but that’s just part of the story. They sponsor local events like the ArTrain and the Summer Sounds concert series. They field teams for the United Way. And 600 of our friends and neighbors work there.

The original St. Albans Hospital was built in 1883. It has grown and morphed from two hospitals into one that now cares for 1,900 inpatients each year. The E.R. sees over 28,000 emergency patients and 7,000 people already walk in to the new Walk-In Clinic in Georgia each year. 400 babies arrive via storks at the Family Birth Center. That all adds up to more than $129 million of patient care each year.

Gov. Shumlin “proposes to increase the tax assessed on hospitals by $17.4 million from 2011. This increase will be used to draw down Federal funds to help address the State budget shortfall,” NMC Chief Executive Officer Jill Bowen told the St. Albans Messenger. “However, the State no longer returns the provider tax to the hospitals in full after it has secured the matching funds.”

In case you missed it, the State of Vermont told the Feds they took in beaucoup bucks as matching funds to increase the “grant” money funneled back to the state. Then the State of Vermont gave most of those beaucoup bucks back to the hospitals.

“Hey, Dick?” Raoul Garcia said. “Isn’t that what I went to jail for?”

Puffin Peeves

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Good old @#$%^ Comcast has a surprisingly fast, accurate, and nice online TV listing page. A popup on the page requires one to enter his or her postal code to display accurate programming and channel numbers. Great idea.

I entered 05990, the zip code for North Puffin.

That’s the zip on my installation address, my service address, and my billing address. Good old Comcast displayed this second popup:

We could not find any service providers for that ZIP Code.
Please try a different 5-digit U.S.Postal Code.

Counting Toes

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Famous Footwear of the KeysSuppose you have seven shoes lined up in front of your rock. Anne gives you four of my shoes because she is tired of tripping over them. How far south is your rock?

World Math Day is tomorrow. Cool.

The Guinness record holding online international mathematics competition had 1,204,766 participants in 56,082 schools in 235 countries last year. The original World Math Day was held on the March 14 (Pi Day) but has moved to the first Wednesday in March except it is on Tuesday this year. No wonder math is so confusing.

Students from across the world have 48 hours to compete in 20 games in each of five levels. (Quick! How many games is that?) Students have only 60 seconds to complete each game. (Quick! How many minutes do half the games take?)

Those 1.2 million students correctly answered 479,732,613 questions in the 2010 challenge. That broke the record of 452,682,682 correct answers that 1.9 million students had posted in 2009.

I’m thinking you need to know math just to keep track of the answers. And the contestants. In fact, I’m thinking you need a computer. After all, World Math Day would not be possible without computers and the Internet to pair off more than a million competitors and track their results in real time.

The abacus, built by Egyptian mathematicians in 2000 BC, was in widespread use centuries before we even started writing numbers down, let alone before we started formally counting by tens. Merchants, traders and clerks in Africa, Asia, and around the world still use it.

Most people think the Abacus was the first arithmetic calculator. That would be wrong. The first arithmetic calculator was a pile of rocks.

Og have 11 rocks. Og give four rocks to Nug. Og have seven rocks left.

And so we learned very early to make change.

Time passed. Math needs multiplied. Edmund Gunter invented the slide rule around 1620 so engineers could figure out how much a church roof rafter would bend. The slide rule can be faster at multiplication and division, and often is faster for roots, logarithms and trigonometry than a calculator, but it doesn’t add or subtract very easily which makes it not nearly as useful as an abacus as tax time draws near. I was in the last class at Stevens Institute required to buy a slide rule.

Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical calculator about 20 years after Gunter made his slipstick but IBM waited until 1954 to demonstrate the first all-transistor model. Their first commercial unit, the IBM 608, cost about $80,000.

Scott Flansburg serves as the Ambassador for World Maths Day and is known as “the human calculator” because he can run the numbers faster than an electronic calculator can. Mr. Flansburg visited All Angels Academy students in Miami Springs a couple of weeks ago. He was there to energize students as they prepare for the contest. This is the second year students from the school will participate in this event.

That’s encouraging.

Kids need to be better at math than I am. After all, there are more numbers now.

I have an undergrad degree in math and science as well as one in mechanical engineering but in real life I combine pursuits like this — writing and photography — with consulting to other small businesses. I don’t engineer stuff every day but I do use math. Every day. I use it to calculate my change at Wally World faster than the cash register. I use it to determine how many network cables I need to set up a client’s new computer system. And the programmers I hire used it to make sure these words I type appear on my screen and, shortly, on yours. Every kid today will use more math in his or her lifetime than you or I have.

For the record, I still have my slide rule. I also have a solar powered Casio full scientific calculator, a lot smaller than their first all-electric “compact” calculator of 1957. My handheld cost $10.

Both my slide rule and my solar calculator require light to work. Mr. Flansburg can work in the dark.

Tomorrow is also Town Meeting Day in most of Vermont. Anne who is a Justice of the Peace (and election official) will be counting shoes (and noses) again. I hope she won’t be counting in the dark.

Premte Peeves

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Darn!

A good friend has spent the last few days rooting her brand new smart phone; she bought it because she couldn’t upgrade her last one enough. Another friend traded in his perfectly good, 2009 sports car because “he couldn’t do any more with the old one.” I wore a hole in my sock this morning; I tossed it.

We don’t darn socks anymore.