mo1
Platinum Member
The "excess" testing does mostly come from lawyers, as in the physician orders a bunch of tests just to prove something that is unlikely to be happening is actually not happening. However, there is a small but nontrivial amount that comes from patient demand, as they "read something on Google" or "heard from so-and-so who is a nurse" about some rare or otherwise unlikely condition and demands testing for it.
Generally the "doctors" that serve as expert witnesses for trial lawyers fall into one of two camps, they either have some kind of an axe to grind or serve as an "expert" in a huge number of these cases to make money. Mostly it is the latter. It is a relatively small number of trial lawyers that will take on malpractice cases as a large majority are meritless, but the ones that do take them take on a bunch of them. They have their small group of "experts" that they trot out repeatedly.
@ultrarunner
Much of the expiration date stuff is simply the maker guaranteeing you will buy their product again repeatedly. The slavish adherence to the arbitrary expiration dates is courtesy of the government through CMS and state inspections or one of the nongovernmental regulatory compliance firms (JCAHO, DNV, etc.) The reason the military doesn't follow expiration dates is 1) they have performed (and published) a lot of testing of medications over time and with few exceptions most pills have an extremely long shelf life, but it's mostly 2) they aren't subject to the regs and inspections civilian healthcare facilities are.
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Going back to the original topic, the wages mentioned being $20-25/hour for newer hires prior to the strike are pretty much in line with what general starting manufacturing wages in this region run, and the cost of living here is actually even a little higher than in the Quad Cities. Deere actually has a facility about 45 minutes away from here but the only position they are hiring is for an EE and they don't list a salary. I tried to see what wages are for other locations on their website but again they were not listed. Adding an $8500 signing bonus and a >30% raise over five years to what was reported as pretty typical industry wages is very generous. Their benefit package also is well above what is typically offered here for manufacturing, and for that matter, about any industry outside of government. Any company that provides zero deductible, zero premium healthcare coverage or provides any healthcare coverage for people who no longer work there is very unusual today. Defined benefit pensions are nearly unheard of as well. Nearly everybody else has some sort of a self-funded retirement account such as a 401(k) which may or may not have a match, and healthcare is high premium, high deductible, and goes away the day you leave.
Deere seems to have come back with a pretty good offer from what I can gather and I wonder just how much more negotiating power the workers actually have and if they have pushed it too far by rejecting this. They certainly run the risk of Deere moving their facility elsewhere knowing they should be able to hire plenty of employees in the new location, and leaving all of the strikers with nothing in the end. Also, if the strikers come across as unreasonable this time, guess what will happen next renegotiation, particularly if the labor market isn't as tight as it is now.
