Fascinating how they successfully encouraged the bone to grow with yours.

I worked for several years in the business office at a County Hospital in Wyoming.  I remember the transition to profits driven  occurring, where even County hospitals became profit driven via their boards and their top tier executives.

First, our new administrator who had no hands on medical experience in anything at all and only an MBA decided that instead of $70,000 a year, he needed to be paid $150,000 a year and this was in about 1992.

The hospital administrator used to pick up his morning paper in the business office every morning when he managed to wander through the front door.  I went to high school with the newest member of the maintenance crew, and being responsible for hospital maintenance is no small thing.  But the new maintenance guy walks into the business office one morning, grabs a pen and furiously scrawls across the frontpage of the morning paper announcing the hospital administrator now getting paid $156,000 a year a comment that the hospital had its own million dollar man for mostly keeping a chair warm.  He threw the pen down, scowled at me (no need to do that, I'm not saying anything....I don't know how that got on there, it isn't my writing).

Then shortly after that I had a day when I was reconciling a recent Medicare payment.  I worked very hard, but I always had to when doing office work because it is so boring for me I need to distract myself.  Anyhow, when I was done reconciling the payment it ended up that my bank deposit was over a million dollars for the day.  When you do numbers all day though, it's just a number, but the next day the financial officer and the administrator acted like I had finished a marathon or something and so had they....we ran it together and I didn't even know.  We didn't preform a surgery or deliver a baby or stop anyone's heart attack but somehow we were rock stars.

Then I was reading the minutes from the latest board meeting shortly after that, and there was a whole segment about how they planned to prevent any midwife outfit from moving into the area.  They were working out a plan of attack.  I was reading it and I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to be reading it while making copies, and when the assistant administrator walked in and I started to ask him why they would work to shutdown a midwife down he snatched the notes out of my hands and told me I had no business reading that.

The reason WHY medical care costs so much in the United States is the additional fee Harvard Business School charges all of us for warming administrative chairs while providing NOT ONE OTHER SINGLE SERVICE THAT GIVES ANYONE ACTUAL HEALTHCARE AND ACTUALLY PREVENTS SOME FROM RECEIVING NEEDED CARE.

It is so sad to see how NOT SMART Ezra is again!

Providers largely charge what they can get away with, often offering different prices to different insurers, and an even higher price to the uninsured.

What this means is - and this is the headache that may cause some stations to just drop the show - stations now have to keep track of which businesses advertising on this basis do not wish to have their ads placed within the time period when Limbaugh's show airs.

Here in Baltimore, there is a local station that airs the show - WCBM - and this was their response to the "campaign" to get advertisers to pull their ads:

Though national advertisers are fleeing Rush Limbaugh after he called a birth control activist a slut, Baltimore seems immune to the exodus.

Executives at WCBM, 680 AM, the affiliate that airs the Rush Limbaugh show locally, said Tuesday that not a single advertiser has dropped out.

Oh, really?

However, Bob Pettit, the station's general manager, did tell the Sun that some advertisers did "postpone" their ads on Limbaugh's show because of the controversy. He would not say which advertisers.

And is it conservatives who have objected to the Limbaugh remarks?  Of course not...it's the e-vil liberals:

Pettit chalked up the few complaints the station did get to "a group of liberal activists."

"We have had a number of calls and emails from a group of liberal activists in their attempt to silence the voice of conservative radio," he said. "Most of these people never listen to WCBM or Rush and it is clear to our Rush sponsors that they don't represent the WCBM listener or their customers."

If you're a conservative activist, though, you can join Brent Bozell in his new online effort: "I Stand With  Rush:"

Brent Bozell, the president and founder of the conservative Media Research Center, has launched a website in support of Rush Limbaugh in the wake of fallout over his attack on Sandra Fluke, because, as Bozell says, "this isn't about what Rush said last week, it's about roaring hypocrisy and it's about censorship."

"Make no mistake about it -- there is a concerted effort under way to remove Rush Limbaugh from the airwaves. To remove all conservative voices from the airwaves. And the liberal media are putting all of their weight behind it," Bozell says.

The site also asks supporters to sign a petition pledging their support to Limbaugh:

"I stand with Rush Limbaugh and appreciate the massive contribution that he has made to the conservative movement and our nation over the last 25 years. Rush has apologized. But the radical left will never accept it because they despise him and want him off the air. I condemn attempts by radical left-wing organizations and the media to censor Rush and his commonsense conservative message."

Here's my take:  Rush is free, as we all are, to say whatever he wants about anyone he wants.  But advertisers are also free to decide they don't want to support the dissemination of Rush's views.  That is, if I'm not mistaken, the free market at work, something I believe conservatives like Limbaugh fully support - except, apparently, when it negatively affects their own bank accounts.  

All the "radical left" is doing is helping hoist this massive contributor on a petard of his own making.

I don't recognize a lot of those brands, so they must be local or regional.