Letters: The Interceptor’s ‘toughness,’ money from a rogue trade
Letters: The Interceptor’s ‘toughness,’ money from a rogue trade
Bob Moon: Happy Wednesday. Time to check the inbox.
Last week, we aired a piece on the new ICD-10 codes. Those are the short-hands that hospitals and clinics use to bill insurance carriers for medical treatments. The old system had about 18,000 codes; the new one has close to eight times that, denoting everything from injuries that occur in opera houses to someone walking into a lamppost.
Dr. Andrew Solomon from Seattle, Wa., wants to share his pain.
Andrew Solomon: I can easily see it taking an hour or more a day to just input the appropriate diagnostic codes. It’s important that we have biostatistical information, but being burned by water skis on fire? Really, that’s not useful information.
This whole European financial crisis thing is beginning to have an eerily familiar ring. We reported that a rogue trader at UBS made Swiss cheese out of $2 billion in bank funds. If you remember, that same thing happened to a French bank, Societe General, back in 2008.
Leona Klerer from Stamford, Conn., wrote in to pose this question.
Leona Klerer: I was wondering, where is that money? Where did it go?
For the answer, here’s the Marketplace Whiteboard guy. Take it away, Paddy Hirsch.
Paddy Hirsch: It looks as though this loss happened in a series of trades over a long period of time. It got spread out really in the entire financial system. You can have some of it in your 401(k), that is conceivable!
Oh, I feel so much better now.
And finally, a few listeners — male, I might add — wrote in after Kai said the Ford Taurus Police Interceptor is the new car of choice for the black-and-whites driven by our nation’s finest. He also said — and this is what most of you have issues with — that “the Interceptor” just doesn’t sound all that threatening compared to its predecessor, the Crown Vic.
Enter Adam Gage of Tampa, Fla., who says bull — the Taurus has already proven its mettle.
Aaron Gage: Given that the Ford Taurus was used as the official car in all of the “Robocop” movies, I think it’s certainly tough enough.
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