Why Bright House's Bay News 9 Won't Tell You the News About AARP's Medicare Advantage Plan

My wife saw the report first on Bay News 9. It informed that AARP was dropping about a thousand doctors from one of its medicare plans. She told me about it and right away I said, "It must be their Medicare Advantage Plan." She said that's not what the report said. A short while later while I was watching the report aired again. As she said, Medicare Advantage was not mentioned. I then went to my PC and Googled "AARP Drops Doctors" and found a headline which read "Patients scramble after AARP Medicare Advantage plans drop providers." In short, it doesn't effect me. After being advised against such a plan by a doctor and previously seeing the part such a plan had played in the death of a friend of mine, I had sworn off Medicare Advantage plans. But, inadvisable or not, that doesn't stop Bright House from collecting revenue from several companies, each of which is selling their Medicare Advantage Plan through infomercials. Just yesterday afternoon, I noticed such infomercials airing on both NBC and FOX at the same time. I wouldn't watch them but I'm guessing they promote their products as a way to simplify your dealings with Medicare and not as a way for them to increase their profits. Do you really expect insurance companies to be honest?

Anyway, how can you possibly call yourself a news channel when you let your parent company's monetary concerns interfere with your reporting of the news? You can't. In addition, I went to the Bay News 9 website and couldn't find the story listed anywhere. What they won't do for their advertisers.

Thinking About Direct TV – DON’T DO IT!

I’m stuck in the middle of a technological nightmare.

First, a couple weeks ago, I came home from a trip to the pool room to find that my pc had crashed. I lost everything – programs, emails, pictures. You name it, I lost it. I picked up a new rig from Office Depot. It has 500 gigs on the hd and 4 gigs of ram. With a 17” flat screen monitor, it cost me $593. Not bad.

Then, the following Sunday, my vcr died. I went out and picked up a new one at WalMart, but it didn’t work. I traded it in for another model which didn’t work either. A kid at Circuit City told me I needed to get a cable box because newer vcrs required a connection from the cable box. (This, I later learned, was a bunch of hooey, as was a lot of what I was told along the line by Best Buy, Direct TV, etc. etc.) I called Bright House and was told I couldn’t get a cable box with my level of service and that I would have to spring for an additional $40 a month if I wanted a box. Vindictive bastard that I am, I said “No, thanks,” and immediately logged on to direct-tv.com. Within moments I had called, explained to the girl rep my vcr woes, and signed up for their cheap $29.99 per month plan. By noon the next day, my satellite service was installed. I even slipped the installer a fin for helping me hook up my new LG, RC897T VCR.

Trouble was the VCR wouldn’t work. What I normally do, because my wife likes to go to bed early and I’m often out playing pool, is program our VCR to record a couple shows that we will watch early, after dinner, the next day. Well, what I couldn’t do is program the new recorder to record one show on FOX from 8 to 9 and then record another on NBC from 9 to 10. Correction – I could do it if I stood in front of the TV and changed channels with the satellite box at the times in question. Not exactly what I had in mind. I called LG customer service and spoke to someone in India who told me over the next 20 minutes how I could get the VCR to perform as I wanted. I programmed it last night and checked the tapes this morning. It did not work. The VCR only recorded the stations the box was tuned to. I called LG again this morning and spoke to someone who spoke English. After hearing my dilemma, she immediately responded that what I wanted to do was impossible because a satellite signal cannot be split. “Well,” I said, “why don’t you tell that to the guy I talked to yesterday.”

I’m pissed, now. I call Direct TV and tell them about it. They offer to sell me more equipment and to increase my monthly bill by another $5.95 for something else that would not quite give me the capabilities I was looking for. Oh, yeah, I had already upgraded my plan to the one with 150 channels because the $29.95 plan gives you nothing – that’s NOTHING! Anyway, I tell the girl to forgetaboutit, “I just want to cancel.” That’s when she hits me with the $347 disconnect fee. There was probably something in that agreement the installer had me sign to that effect. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave me a copy. “Do you still want to cancel?” “YES, I STILL WANT TO CANCEL.”

So, as of midnight tonight, the satellite will no longer be sending me beams. Tomorrow morning, between 8 – 10, the Bright House guy will be here to hook me up with a cable box which is what I should’ve opted for in the first place before I got the idea of showing the world how smart I am. To mollify Uppy, my frugal better half, I cancelled NetFlix to help defray our increased cable costs. Our next dvd will come from the movie cube down at WalMart.

Postscript: After the hookup to cable, my new VCR (or DVD-R) still wouldn't work. After a few calls, I hooked up with another young fellow from the manufacturer, LG Electronics. He told me the cable box was the problem. He instructed me that I could get the unit to perform the way I wanted if I bypassed the cable box. So, I went to Radio Shack and purchased a splitter and split the signal as it came into the house and sent one line to the cable box and another to the VCR. That did the trick. Honestly, I had never heard of LG before, but based on their commitment to customer service I wouldn't hesitate to buy one of their products in the future.

Update - I received a response from the FCC today, 11/03/2008. Here are the pivotal points:

"Billing and service disputes between customers and satellite providers are not subject to FCC jurisdiction...

You may file a complaint with the FTC. The FTC does not normally investigate or resolve specific complaints: they look for trends of patterns when an issue appears to warrant action."

In other words, I'm screwed.