The Natural Cures

As we recently posted, FeedBurner's integration into Google is moving along. We've got our coding hats on and are hard at work to get the essential product pieces where they need to be.

However, one somewhat-below-the-radar part of FeedBurner's integration that is already showing up as part of google.com is our new Help Center. (Well, "new" as of late 2007. We admit to being a touch slow on the draw with the PR on this one.) We point this out to show that migrating to a Googley-er tomorrow isn't strictly tied to FeedBurner charts 'n graphs 'n numbers. It used be difficult to find answers; a popup window here, a Forums post there, a blog post over yonder. The Help Center brings sorely needed structure (and searchability) to a bunch of resources that were largely scattered about before. You can now find topics like "What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?", and "Is there a feed file size limit?" in just one place. (We've still got nothing for you on "How can I avoid jury duty selection?") The Help Center will soon introduce new troubleshooting topics and contact options as well.

Speaking of the Forums: they are overdue for the Google treatment, too. We've provided them since shortly after FeedBurner launched as an essential, community-powered companion to the service itself. In the next few weeks, the Forums will move to a new Google Group, with the following benefits:

• Much less spam
• Improved [BUY CH3AP STUFF ONL1NE] search for old topics and conversations
• New email notification options when new topics are posted
• Much, much [FREE V!AGRA NOW] less spam

We also want to point out that FeedBurner Japan is also going to benefit from these Help Center and Groups changes, too. But what about the many other languages FeedBurner publishers use? Google strongly believes in making products accessible to the widest global audience; efforts to formally localize FeedBurner for the most popular and requested languages are under way, going well beyond the options we currently offer.

And, finally: Leap Year post!

After revelations that it was asking physicians to help the company find reasons to cancel members' policies, WellPoint-owned Blue Cross of California in February said it would stop sending letters asking doctors to review patients' insurance applications.

But repercussions of its attempts to get physicians to cooperate in the plan's controversial attempts at insurance rescission are just beginning.

California State Assembly Member Hector De La Torre drafted legislation that would require health plans to gain final approval from the Dept. of Insurance or Dept. of Managed Care before cancelling policies. Later, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo launched his department's own investigation into health insurers' practices, putting up a Web site (www.protectingtheinsured.org) for consumers and physicians to send information about possible malfeasance.

The issue also caught the attention of Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said it was another indication of the need for comprehensive health system reform. "People who are not insured have to live in fear, and people who are insured have to live in fear," he said. "That is outrageous."

Shortly after the governor's remarks, Blue Cross announced that it would stop sending the letters, saying it had "determined this letter is no longer necessary, and in fact was creating a misimpression and causing some members and providers undue concern."

A copy of the letter obtained by AMNews said in part:

[...]

You've heard the term "credit crunch" and predictions that the American economy is heading for a recession. But what does that mean? And more important, what does that mean for the medical industry?

While experts agree there really isn't a recession-proof industry, they also agree that if there were, health care would be it. When someone has a broken arm, fixing it isn't an optional expense.

But the patient's ability to pay for that care does ripple through the health care industry.

A credit crunch occurs when the secondary lending market collapses, causing banks to hold on to more loans, leaving less money to lend. Two or three years ago, when banks were able to sell loans as fast as they were making them, it was easier for businesses and individuals to secure a loan. Experts point at this ease as the root of the crunch, as subprime loans were made to people who couldn't afford them. Many of the borrowers defaulted, or landed in deep financial trouble.

Physicians are not immune to problems with personal finances. And a credit crunch may impact the financial standing of a private practice. Even physicians not in business for themselves may feel the crunch when it comes to where they work and their ability to find a new job.

Reimbursement issues are nothing new to physicians. But it's the private payers most likely to cause problems during a nationwide credit crunch. Private payers, including those who have insurance but also high deductibles and co-pays, have less money to spend. And health care may not be a priority.

[...]

Hi there. You may be looking in your feed reader every day and thinking "Another no-news-'bout-FeedBurner day." You may be starting to think, "Are they still in there? In the FeedBurner bubble, burning the feeds? Did somebody maybe shut off their connection to the Tubes?" You may be thinking that or worse. We have some good news, and some just newsy news.

First, the good news. We are totally still here, burning the feeds, writing the checks (that's some sweet cursive Giuliana's wielding), and analyzing the analytics.

Next, the newsy news, aka "what we did over summer and winter and spring vacation." If you are looking for juicy announcements, this section is NOT for you. This is more like the academic paper section of the post, except for the fact it lacks erudition and other big vocabulary words. We have been and are busy integrating FeedBurner into a more Googley way of life. This Googley way of life is very different on the backend architecture side, so the team has been busy both scaling and maintaining the existing environment, while simultaneously rewriting the system to act like one of the cool kids in the more Googley (Googly? Can we get a ruling on this one?) architecture world.

So, if you're a publisher, a good next question is "Um, why are you doing this again?" The answers are numerous, so let's itemize a few of them:

• Full integration with Google. Integration makes it possible to connect with other Google offerings. For example, only a fraction of our publishers have had the opportunity to participate in the FeedBurner Ad Network to date. We would like to offer this capability to an order of magnitude more publishers, and full integration into Google architecture will make this not just a possibility but a likelihood (more on this in the next couple months).
• More and better services. As any Mies Van der Rohe fan will tell you, "more is more." By getting our systems fully integrated into a Google architecture, it will be easier for us to provide some services we've long envisioned but have never really been able to provide because of scale challenges. These include but are not limited to parameterized feeds (e.g., think feeds of query results), a wider variety of email services (those of you wishing to import legitimate-yet-massive email lists know what we mean), and other stuff. And by "stuff," we mean "things."
• Easier to scale as load on the system increases. As more feeds are burned and are hit by more kinds of feed reading bots and readers and API's and crawlers, even feeds that don't have new subscribers see increased activity. Full integration into Google will mean an easier time working through performance and scalability bottlenecks, which means the engineering resources now hard at work on scaling can move on to enhancing services.

Why not build new services and integrate at the same time? There are lots of opinions about the best way to go through integrations. Our perspective is that the time you lose trying to continuously merge an updated legacy codebase with a new rewrite causes you be in a world of never actually getting the integration done because you're constantly working on merge problems, which gives you less time to add new features OR get the new backend integration done, and eventually you kind of grind to a halt, much like Achilles trying to catch the Tortoise in Zeno's paradox. We're confident, in fact, that Zeno would have used software integration to illustrate his paradox had he lived in less pre-Socratic times. Anyhoo, we decided to bite the bullet and go full-on integration (while maintaining the existing environment) as much as possible, knowing that it would mean few new features or capabilities while we went on our backend integration journey. So, while we have continued to add hundreds of thousands of new publishers and feeds, you haven't heard a lot from us despite a lot of hard work. It's not really that exciting to post "Soon, you will have everything you used to have, only it will look different to the people working on it here!"

There are lots of lots of product integration points that we know people would like to see, and we are looking forward to those as well. These opportunities are not lost on some of the brighter students at Google, and believe me, there are some real brainiacs around here. We keep whispering to each other in the hallways, "What if they find out we're stupid?"

On the customer side, we have been signing up new publishers right and left (or left and right, depending on whether you live in the northern or southern hemisphere), and in fact, our publisher services team is busier than ever. We used to announce all of these new publishers, but it's a bit less exciting to announce customers that are already customers of other parts of the company without feeling like the kids in school who are the last ones to do everything. (Simulated conversation. FeedBurner: "Hey, we just burned our millionth feed!" Search: "It's cute how they still get excited about numbers in the millions.")

At the end of 2007, UnitedHealth Group executives vowed to improve their operations and physician relations after saying the company lost 315,000 commercial members, mostly because it mishandled the 2005 acquisition of PacifiCare.

In late January, California insurance regulators offered their own numbers to measure how badly they believed United mishandled the PacifiCare deal.

One number was a fine of $3.5 million by the California Dept. of Managed Health Care, over mishandling claims, the largest penalty that department has ever issued.

Another number -- $1.3 billion -- is the maximum fine the California Dept. of Insurance could levy on the health plan. While analysts consider that amount unlikely, United still could face a hefty fine depending on how many of its apparent violations of state laws and regulations on paying medical claims are deemed "willful." Each "willful" violation is a maximum $10,000 fine, and each not considered intentional is a maximum $5,000.

Even if all are considered non-willful, then United could face as much as a $650 million fine -- about 50 times greater than any penalty the department has ever imposed, and a similar proportion greater than the $12 million paid last October in a 36-state settlement over payment practices.

That's because of one more number: 133,000. That is how many violations the insurance department said it uncovered, representing a period between June 23, 2006 and May 31, 2007. Meanwhile, the managed care department said 30% of the medical claims it reviewed were improperly denied. The insurance department regulates PPOs, while the managed care department regulates HMOs, and they conducted a joint, eight-month investigation into PacifiCare.

[...]