Hospital Bill Literacy 101. “A frequent error of hospitals occurs with respect to intravenous solutions that are administered on the day of admission,” according to the Hospital Accountability Project of the Service Employees International Union (“Bitter Bills to Swallow: A consumer guide to the 20 most common ways hospitals overcharge patients”). “The hospital computer will bill you for a full day’s worth of IV solutions–for example, $189 for an IV ampicillin antibiotic solution. That is the daily rate. But if you are admitted late in the day, you may only receive four hours’ worth of solution and you should not have to pay for a full day’s rate.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Together, increased moisture and moderated temperatures [downwind of Lake Michigan] have played a strong role in the nature of the wild vegetation itself,” writes Field Museum botanist William Burger in Chicagoland Gardening (January/February). “Forests with many beech trees, distinguished by their smooth pale gray bark, are common in northwestern Indiana and in western Michigan,” downwind from the lake. “There are no such forests in northeastern Illinois. Likewise, sassafras trees and shrubs are common and even weedy around the Indiana and Michigan dunes, but they are quite rare around Chicago. The spicebush (Lindera benzoin), whose leaves are so strongly aromatic when crushed, is common in the understory of moist forests in northern Indiana and Michigan, but it is much less often encountered on our side of the lake.”
Saved from the secularists. “On a cold, serious, and often lonely campus like Chicago, being part of a warm community is an inestimable comfort,” writes Anne Pretz, a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago, in the newsletter “Calvert Times” (Winter). “It was here [Calvert House] that I found refuge from a campus that often not only misunderstood Catholicism, but was also hostile to it.”
