Be The Pigeon

Those of you who know me well knew this one must be coming. I just filed my taxes. This year we used TurboTax instead of the TaxCut product we'd used in previous years. (In my opinion, the cheapest one is the best one.) Every year around this time I marvel at how oligopolies work so well. First, a not-so-fake analogy. Why, when you try to buy tickets online at places like Ticketmaster, do you have to pay a "convenience" fee that ultimately increases the price of your tickets up to 20%? This so-called convenience fee is presumably for the privilege of buying stuff online in my underwear and not having to go to the grocery store to wait in line and buy tickets (where you'd then pay a service fee instead). However, the real convenience, we all know, is for our good friends at Ticketmaster, since they can fire 25% of their people now that we all use the Internet. Therefore, I'm paying them extra to do something that's more efficient for them, and thus ...

OK, warning. Another conspiracy theory is about ready to land... I'm preparing to wax political and mount my soapbox. I had a procedure done at the local hospital recently. No, it wasn't a lobotomy, though I'm sure they'd have charged even more. Without disclosing my entire health history for the entire Internet to ponder over, I figured this diagnostic procedure would cost a few hundred bucks and that my health insurance would cover the majority. Today I get the bill from my wife and find out that not only did it cost me $13.09 per minute, but the insurance covered none of it! So this leaves me wondering why my more-than-$300-per-month health-care premium is so worthless. I looked it up (I'm sure most of you are calling me stupid about now) and found that I get the pleasure of forking out many hundreds of dollars for deductibles with zero insurance before anything at all gets reimbursed. I'm thinking, "OK, so after paying thousands a year to carry ...