Letters

Do the math

Re “Vet” (15 Minutes, Nov. 14):

He says he is 75 years old and was a gunner on a recoilless 106 anti tank gun. You kids down there at Reno News & Review might be shocked to hear that there is this thing called mathematics, and his numbers don’t add up. The Korean war started in 1950 and ended in 1953, which, through the miracle of subtraction, tells us that war happened between 60 and 63 years ago. A man who is 75 years old today would have been between the ages of 13 and 15 years old during that war. Last time I checked, the U.S. armed forces didn’t allow 13-year-olds to enlist.

Chris Rosamond

Truckee

Who do you think you’re reading, anyway?

Re “Boycott Thanksgiving Sales” (Editorial, Nov. 21):

Go eat your turkey in peace and quit trying to model other people’s lives to your sublime notions of a model society.

Dean Chaney

Sun Valley

Muy bueno

Re “Going back to caliente” (Foodfinds, Nov. 21):

Dave Preston’s review of Rigo’s Mexican Cuisine restaurant was spot on. We have been customers of Rigo’s for as long as he has been open. We have enjoyed eating at his restaurant at least once or twice a week. Rigo prides himself on using fresh natural ingredients. His menu items are mostly prepared from scratch. His family recipes are very authentic Mexican, Inca and Aztec food served in a family friendly atmosphere. It is at a location difficult to find the first time, but well worth the effort—at the northwest corner of East Prater Way and Sparks Boulevard in the Hacienda Shopping Center in Sparks. His seafood items are the greatest. We especially enjoy his salsa and chips.

Kudos to Dave for his article. It is an accurate portrayal of Rigo’s.

Glen and Roberta Godfrey

Sparks

Yeah, no kidding

Re “2013 Thanksgiving Family Guide” (Supplement, Nov. 7):

Thank you for publishing the “2013 Thanksgiving Family Guide.” So far, it has been the only public acknowledgment I have seen of the Thanksgiving holiday.

I wonder if anyone else noticed that the Jack-o-Lanterns were still brightly grinning on the front steps when corporate America unleashed its annual barrage of Christmas marketing. Time was, the Christmas shopping season did not officially begin until after Santa’s arrival in Herald Square, and that seemed a decent compromise: to wait until Thanksgiving for the madness to begin. But now, it seems, corporate management has decided to eliminate Thanksgiving from the canon of American holidays, and the reason is obvious: aside from the loss-leader ads for Butterball turkeys in the supermarket, they still have not figured out a way to make money from it. And, as we all know, nothing is of any value if doesn’t make a buck.

Life in America has become just one long series of marketing events. We begin the year with the Super Bowl, followed quickly by Valentine’s Day. It then moves on to Easter and into the summer “grilling season.” At the end of summer, there is back to school, followed closely by Halloween and now, it seems, Christmas.

Words only have the meaning that we give to them. Now, we have Black Friday all year long; it has become a code word for “get out there and spend.” Hopefully, Christmas itself will not suffer the same fate.

Ahh, the joys of life in a free-market Capitalist society. God save us.

Bill Nickerson

Reno

The hooker will see you now

Re “The doctor won’t see you now” (Feature story, Nov. 28):

I love the “cup of coffee per day” example. Yeah, go to the Star of the Megabucks, and for the price of a cup of coffee per day, you can buy a new Mini or get a new bike or get married or get a divorce or go to the doctor. So what is next? For the price of a cup of coffee per day, maybe you could, just maybe, get an actual cup of coffee? C’mon. We are just being asked to pay to leave others outside and not actually to get anything that we were not already getting. But I guess you do what you have to do. Now I’m gonna make myself a cup of coffee before I have to pay me 160 bucks per month to let me make a cup of coffee.

David R. Gomez

Reno

It’s all in the bottom line

Re “The doctor won’t see you now” (Feature story, Nov. 28):

There is a math issue here. The article claims that two-thirds of the $1,600 a year for 600 patients goes back to the doctor and that amounts to $125,000 a year? Well, 600 patients at $1,600 each is $960,000. Two of that is $640,000. So … where is the rest of the money going? If they were really sending two-thirds of the money back to the doctor, and $125,000 is what the doctor was OK with then that would mean they could charge 1.5 times $125,000 or $187,500 spread among 600 patients is $312 a year per patient. So is MDVIP overcharging its patients?

Ken Mela

Sparks

Editor’s note: It appears your equation does not include the doctor’s costs of running a medical practice, which is factored into the deal with MDVIP.

Good job on medical story

Re “The doctor won’t see you now” (Feature story, Nov. 28):

Your article on concierge medicine did a great job of describing and analyzing a very worrisome development in family/primary care medicine in America.

Senior citizens, my wife and I live in a firmly middle-class community in Maryland, halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Some five years ago, concierge or boutique medicine came to our locality. Judging by the letters to the local weekly newspaper, a lot of people were not happy about it—including my wife and I—because we really liked our doctors but decided to go elsewhere when their medical practice announced that it was going “boutique.”

Sometime after that, when we had found another medical practice that offered primary care via the “traditional” way (i.e., insurance-based), we learned that our old doctors had decided not to go boutique/concierge after all—they announced that they were suspending their decision for a while, and in the end, my old doctor did not switch to the concierge model. However, the concierge model never did go away, and some docs in our town are doing business that way.

Ironically, our new doctor recently switched to a homeopathic model and left the new primary care practice where we had originally sought refuge. So, we began a new search for primary care. As a retired federal civil servant, I have chosen to subscribe to both Medicare and good secondary health insurance (the latter being The Federal Employee Program, which is excellent but not inexpensive). The search for new doc No. 2 was successful but unnerving as well as sad, since we realized that issues about supply, demand and ability to pay are indeed taking center stage in our nation’s health care system.

Harold Holzman

Columbia, Md.

Hide your shame

Re “The doctor won’t see you now” (Feature story, Nov. 28):

You should be ashamed of yourself for presenting such a sketchy article that involves two doctors and very few verifiable statistics. You want to scare a lot of old people. Shame, shame.

John Bogdovitz

Reno