In Valid Logic

I don’t get how the medical industry can function.

So I’ve already posted how the hospital was gunning for their money 30 mins after my son was born back in July. So they got paid.

Then when he was coming up on two months, we started getting a trickling of other bills. The OB had some weird billing practices and we still owed on her delivery. Then we got the copay bill for the circumcision. Then we got the copay bill for the anesthesiologist. $300 here, $200 there, $400 for that one. What next, is the cook going to send me a bill for the room service?

Why can’t they just do all inclusive billing? I would much rather know all my expenses up front than to get bills trickling in one after another 2 months after the fact.

But then the thing that made me nearly crap my pants. Got the mail yesterday to find something from the hospital. Open it up, and the first thing I see before opening it up all the way is “Amount Due: $14,472″. I accidentally let an expletive slip with a toddler in the room. Though one you open it up and look over the fine details, you see it has three boxes: Amount due, amount due from insurance, and amount due from patient. The $14k was amount due from insurance, amount due from patient was $0. But why are they sending me a notice that insurance still hasn’t paid them? I don’t care. The insurance industry is just as messed up as their own billing practices. At the very minimum, they could make the statement a little bit clearer. It isn’t pleasant to take it out and see the top 1/3rd first with some big dollar amount.

That’s my rant for the day.

Last weekend, I was working on reinstalling Debian Lenny on one of my servers when I want into the same issue I’ve encountered time and time again. I have a couple of Dell PowerEdge 1950s which use Broadcom network cards, and the Broadcom firmware is classified as non-free by Debian and not included on the network install CD (maybe others, thats the only one I use). For some reason, Ubuntu includes the drivers, but Debian doesn’t. My eye-rolling aside, in this case I preferred Debian over Ubuntu.

Now the problem… I’m about 45 minutes away from my servers. On all my own servers, one thing I had decided is an absolute must to have the remote management cards (DRAC5 in my 1950s) which supports remote console and virtual media. This is awesome for remotely reinstalling an operating system, but not so good when it asks you for an additional driver by removable media… and of course, when it is your network card driver.

I don’t quite recall how I got through it last time, though it involved a fair amount of coursing, particularly because the installer asks for the .fw file when it really just wants the .deb.

This time around, I found a nicely prepared ISO with the deb on it, however the DRAC only support one virtual CDROM, and it didn’t seem to find it if I unmounted the installation media and mounted the ISO with the deb on it.

There was also some information about PXE booting with the driver, but that sounded like an overly complicated solution.

My route? If it can’t find it on the virtual cdrom, try the virtual floppy! The deb is only 102kb, so just fire up Magic ISO, create a new floppy image, copy it in, and save it. Mount it to the virtual floppy and problem solved.

Encounter the same issue? Download my floppy image!