David Acevedo's Blog

A few years ago I was involved in a car accident. Not my fault, I got rear ended and my car totaled.  For over a year I suffered from severe back pain. My orthopedic surgeon and back specialist looked at the X-rays, the ordered MRIs. The back pain was getting worse and at times it was excruciating. All I got was a prescription to Hydro-codone, the generic of the Vicodin. Last year I decided to take advantage of the time between jobs to concentrate on getting healthy again. Throughout the pain, I had kept working because I couldn't afford to leave work and the pain was intermittent, so some days, it was not too terrible. I only used the (sixty pill!) bottle of Vicodin I got for emergencies, or plane trips, were sitting in a chair in pain was just too much. But since Vicodin is so powerful (it puts me in a daze) I could not use it for work, so I managed work in pain , sitting for long hours in front of a monitor doing work. The pain had not only reduced the quality of life ,...

My doctor just quit private practice. I asked her why and she said that with the downturn in the economy she lost 30% of her patients so she was shutting down. I asked her how much it would be for a doctor's visit if she went cash only. She said $50.00 which is the same amount my chiropractor charges for an adjustment for cash only. This seems rather reasonable considering I pay $25 deductible with my insurance. But in reality $50.00 can be a better deal for the doctor, since she gets it cash up front and doesn't need to wait to get paid or worry about billing codes or have staff to handle that. We discussed how health insurance was now more like catastrophic insurance , very expensive one too. It wasn't health insurance, it was hospitalization/accident insurance. And Mike Huckabee compares it to house insurance (see previous blog). I can't believe that there are people who don't see the need to reform health care and the importance of 'Obamacare.'

In Puerto Rico there were a few movie theaters: one in each mall, a few independents here and there, and the occasional chains. City theaters which didn't have access to parking died out as they did in most of America, but overall the segment was doing well. Then Plaza decided to build a lot more theaters. I remember when the theater in Plaza was only on the third floor next to the food court close to Sears and on the opposite side from the Gonzales Padín/Borders area. After college in those blighted days that I was unemployed in Puerto Rico with my Princeton degree (It looks so nice on the wall...) and lacked money to gas my car sometimes I begged for car rides from friends. One time a friend of mine, his girlfriend and I went to catch a movie, and I asked him for a ride since he lived near me. I ended up saving his car from getting robbed that night but more on that later. So Plaza las Americas the central mall in San Juan, decides to double the movie theater capacity even though...