If you've visited a doctor that was outside your insurance company's network you may want to look into how much they charged.  From an Associated Press article about health insurance companies being investigated and hit with fines:

Rockefeller and other congressmen, along with doctors and consumer groups, say that more accountability and transparency are needed in how insurance companies determine out-of-network rates, and that patients need to understand how it's done to avoid sticker shock when they get their medical bills.Typically, health plans will pay a set percentage, say 70 percent, for an out-of-network visit.

But unknown to many consumers, when patients go out of network, their plan doesn't actually pay 70 percent of the doctor's visit cost. It pays 70 percent of what it determines is the "usual, customary and reasonable" cost for the procedure or doctor's visit in question.

Insurance companies determine that cost themselves or use figures from a database of their choosing, and there's scant regulation or oversight of how they do it.

Don't you love it?  This is akin to me saying to you, "Hey look, if you pay me $50 a month I'll agree to pay for 90% of any repair you need to have to your car as long as you take it to one of the following garages.  But if you're stuck on the road and need to use another garage I'll pay 70% of what I think are reasonable charges.  Now I have this wonderful database of what is reasonable to charge for any car repair so don't you worry about it."  Then when you get the oil changed at a garage outside the network and they charge you $25 but my database tells me a reasonable price is $5 then I'll pay 70% of the $5 bill and stick you with the rest.  But here's the kicker: I won't ever tell you what my "reasonable" rates are so you'll just have to live with it and when you're stuck on the road you'll just have to hope and pray that the nearest garage's rates are within shouting distance of my "reasonable" rates.

The US Postal Service says its about to run out of money and might have to end weekend delivery.  Whiners.

Apparently insider lending is common practice at banks, with banks regularly giving loans to executives and directors.  Okay, it's not really a shock that muckety-mucks in banks would have special access but when you read this article in the Charlotte Observer it becomes apparent that the insider dealing went to pretty high extremes at North Carolina's own Bank of America and Wachovia.

Charlotte's two big banking names are among the biggest insider lenders.

At Bank of America, those loans more than doubled last year, to $624 million – the biggest dollar jump in the country. The largest of them likely went to three directors or their companies. The surge came during the third quarter as credit markets froze, the government prepared to infuse banks with billions in tax dollars and the board approved the purchase of troubled Merrill Lynch.

Wachovia ended 2008 with $747 million of insider loans, second only to the much larger JPMorgan. All of the loans were held by Wachovia directors or their companies, with just five holding the largest. Last year, the company had to sell itself amid staggering losses in part due to a 2006 deal.

According to the article the lending at BofA really accelerated in 2008 at a time when the credit markets crashed and when the bank was the recipient of a rather large government bailout.  I'm thinking that the bank's directors were VERY happy to have their seats last year.

How can it be that the banks are tottering after the government fortified them with hundreds of billions in bailout cash and guarantees on their troubled assets? For the past 18 months, the banks' problems with toxic securities, especially collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other exotic products that packaged subprime mortgages, attracted most of the attention – and alarm. Now the storm is entering an entirely new phase that's potentially even more dangerous: a historic meltdown in the bread-and-butter businesses of credit card, home-equity, and mortgage lending.

The scale of potential losses in consumer and business loans swamps what's left from the securities debacle by a factor of three or four to one. And the next wave, the looming defaults on commercial real estate loans financing the likes of half-leased retail malls, will soon cause a fresh round of pain. "We've now moved from the securities phase to the lending phase of the banking crisis," says Tanya Azarchs, a managing director in S&P's financial services ratings group. "For 2009 we expect that loan losses will be much worse than for 2008 and that securities write-downs will be much less."

Ouch.

At the end of a Bloomberg article on the increase in commercial credit defaults that banks are seeing you'll find this gem:

Most troubled commercial properties have loans that are either syndicated or packaged into securities and sold to investors, and aren’t owned by a single lender. One Riverwalk Place, an 18-story office building in San Antonio, defaulted this year, as did Riviera Holdings Corp., a Las Vegas-based casino owner. Neither loan is owned by a single lender.

Banks, like real estate developers, sold off most of the riskiest debt, said Dan Fasulo, a London-based managing director at Real Capital Analytics.

“They keep the good deals for themselves, and they do the riskier, shadier stuff with a partner,” Fasulo said. “What are you going to do with the bad stuff? You’re going to try to syndicate it privately.”

Sound familiar?