Poor Mojo's Newswire

For those of us who don't live in the rarefied world of "concierge" anything, here's how a concierge doc works: you, as a doc, sign up people for a fixed monthly amount, then you offer them hand-held service for that monthly payment. Also part of the arrangement is a (sometimes explicit, sometimes assumed) limit on the total number of patients the doc will see - say, 600 people total [for more on this secretive and explosive healthcare topic - called panel size - check out tomorrow's Doc Gurley post titled "Can't get an appointment with your doc? Here's the secret reason why..."]. So what kind of hand-held service are we talking about? Besides getting all your medical visits (sometimes unlimited, sometimes with a co-pay or capped number), you usually also get 24-hour access to your doctor by some combo of cell/email, no wait for appointment times, and even, when desired, you can be accompanied to visits with specialists. Patients who choose this route are expected to own at least catastrophic health coverage, in case of hospitalization or a specialist-heavy illness like a new cancer diagnosis. The shocker for most of us is finding out just how relatively cheap these concierge docs are - we're talking monthly basic cable numbers. Specifically, anywhere from $39 a month to around $139 a month, usually scaled based on age, with wide variations depending on the doctor's demand, reputation, and geography. It turns out, some of these free-wheeling docs got sick and tired of waiting for Washington to solve the healthcare crisis, and decided to offer their services for the same price - even if the patient did not have catastrophic (or other) insurance coverage. In other words, for the working healthcare-coverage denied/poor.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime. As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory. The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts. This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

Choi Jin-sil, a South Korean actress and model who died by apparent suicide in 2008, is being sued posthumously for failing to maintain a decent image while working as a spokesmodel for the Shinhan Engineering and Construction Co, LTD.

What's worse is that the South Korean Court ruled in their favor. The heirs of Jin-sil are being forced by the courts to repay the damages requested, totaling the equivalent of almost $400,000.

So what is it that Jin-sil did to fail in maintaining a decent image? She was a survivor of her husband's abuse. Pictures were released after Jin-sil ended up in the hospital as a result of this abuse.