Word is part of the Senate compromise on health care includes expanding Medicare to the uninsured who are 55 and over. This video from Humana is a pretty good primer on the Medicare process. For instance, I didn’t know the differences between Medicare Parts A, B, C, and D, and now I do.

The recession has fewer people eating out, which means less in tips for waiters and waitresses. This can only accentuate the hard feeling felt by restaurant staff at poor tippers. A recent posting on the blog Waiter Rant asked waiters and waitresses which people they considered to be the worst at doling out an adequate [...]

A few months ago we did a series called Health Care Horror Stories. Back then, the House had yet to pass its health care bill and the Senate bill wasn’t even out of committee. The process is much further along now, but considering that the Senate still has to pass its bill (which its currently debating), and that the two chambers will then have to reconcile the differences between the two pieces of legislation and send that meshed bill back to their respective bodies for one more vote each, there is still a long way to go.

So it might be a good time to take another look at some of the more egregious experiences of those who have been ensnared in our less-than-perfect system of health insurance. In researching these, it’s not necessarily the anger, frustration, and sheer incredulity of the people effected that make an impression, but the sheer number stories in which those emotions have prompted a need to vent publicly.

These extracts have been edited for spelling, grammar, and length. A list of sites from which they were taken can be found at the end of the text.

In researching a “health care horror stories” post, I came across one that struck me as especially sad, posted on one of the sites devoted to such material. This had been edited for spelling and grammar. My mother became dizzy and fell on her kitchen floor. Since her hip was intensely painful, my sister called [...]

…but not in the way you think. What with the Fed printing money like it’s Parker Brothers, the dollar ain’t what it used to be. Yet, it’s also so much more, thanks to master of origami Won Park. The site Design Inspiration has posted a couple of dozen photos of Park’s creations — either one [...]

With jokes like “that’s like saying that tautologies are tautological,” not sure you’ll be seeing Yoram Bauman, Ph.D, aka The Stand-Up Economist, on Conan O’Brien (though Jay Leno may be willing to give him a whirl, at this point). In this video, he riffs on Greg Mankiw‘s classic textbook, Principles of Economics.

Click on an image to see it full size. More photos here.

Some guest poems from the Wall Street Poet’s web site, including No Investor or a Broker Be by Karl Neice No investor or a broker be In times when future nigh As postwar doldrums see Us through 2025 Cash is king, long live its value Its liquidity, and interest free When deflation signs can tell [...]

…let there be light. But not generated by a public utility. It should be investor-owned and free of government regulation.” Okay, that’s not an actual amendment in the Conservative Bible Project, which seeks to “render God’s word into modern English while removing liberal distortions.” The initiative, subject of an AP article today, is being hosted by [...]

Google has released its Year-End Zeitgeist, in which the search engine “examines the billions of queries that people around the world have typed into Google search to discover the spirit of the times.”

In the U.S. economy section, these terms showed up as the most searched-for:

1. crisis
2. cash for clunkers
3. iceland
4. california
5. recession
6. obama
7. unemployment rate
8. green
9. great depression
10. inflation