Clark's Big Book of Bargains (15 page)

• Internet •

• www.canadameds.com
  

• www.rxaminer.com
  

* THE EMERGENCY ROOM *

The best way to save money on a visit to the emergency room is not to go. I’m not kidding.

In most large cities, you have the option of going to an emergency room or going to a “doc-in-the-box,” those small medical offices where you can walk in without an appointment. Unless you have an extremely serious medical emergency, you’ll do much better financially by going to a doc-in-the-box than an emergency room.

Emergency rooms are being swamped with patients, with maladies that range in severity from bumps and bruises to life-threatening injuries. As a result, the ERs are dysfunctional. Waits can be inordinately long and they’re very expensive. If you have a cold and you’re worried it might be something worse, you’re far better off going to a doc-in-the-box. They’re generally cheaper and you’ll be seen faster. It’s much less of a hassle.

Having said that, a visit to a doc-in-the-box may not be covered by your health plan, whereas visits to emergency rooms generally are covered, if you deem it to be an emergency. Under the law, if a reasonable person would consider it an emergency, you may go to the emergency room and get reimbursed for the care. You can figure out what to do by checking in advance to see how your health plan treats these kinds of situations.

I’m in an HMO, and it has a cooperative arrangement with some of the doc-in-the-boxes. So I pay the same amount for a visit there as I would to my HMO.

If your medical condition, or the medical condition of someone in your family, is truly serious, go to the emergency room. My co-author, Mark Meltzer, had to take his seventy-seven-year-old father, Morty, to the emergency room after a bad cold worsened. It was definitely the right call. Morty wound up spending two days in the hospital before he recovered.

If you do go to an emergency room, keep track of the bills you get and check to see what insurance pays and what you are responsible to pay. Don’t ever assume a single bill is the entire bill. You may have separate bills for the attending physician, and for radiology. After thirty days, find out from the hospital if there is anybody else who needs to be paid, because you must submit a timely claim to your insurance company.

I hear often from people who are having trouble with their credit because they neglected to pay a bill following a visit to an emergency room. Often it’s from a specialist or business allied with the emergency room (such as a radiologist or laboratory that might have done blood work) that might not have had your correct address. Ultimately, it ends up messing up your credit. So it’s up to you, a month later, to figure out who you might owe, and file a proper insurance claim.

CHAPTER 4
LEISURE

My mother used to tell me, “All work and no play makes Clark a dull boy.” I had so much ambition when I was younger that I never slowed down to enjoy things at all. But I’ve learned to take it easier. Now I take six weeks of vacation a year. During the other forty-six weeks I still work too much, but I do take time for myself.

While I believe in taking time for yourself, I also believe that spending too much money doesn’t make your leisure time any more enjoyable. You can have a lot of leisure activity in your life, yet do it at a very reasonable cost. It’s simply a matter of making minor changes, to spend less money. If you get a great bargain on a vacation trip, for example, you might save enough to pay for another trip. In this chapter, I’ll tell you how to save money on books; music CDs; video games; movie, theater, and sports tickets; and vacations to ski or swim.

* MOVIES *

I was so disappointed by the demise of the dollar movie theater. But I soon realized that its passing was a good thing for movie lovers, because first-run movies are now coming out on DVD faster than ever.

People are buying DVD copies of movies—or watching films on pay-per-view—so soon after they first appear in the theater that second-run movie houses couldn’t survive.

Some DVDs are now cheaper than music CDs. The movie studios have realized that they can sell a lot of DVDs by pricing them at less than twice the cost of a full-price theater ticket. Some less-popular movies can be had for less than $10. Popular movies are going for around $15 and major hits for $20. With a movie ticket going for $7.50 to $9 in most parts of the country, being able to buy a copy of a movie on DVD for $10, $15, or $20 is a good deal—especially if it’s something you’ll watch again and again. If you’re not sure you’re going to watch a movie more than once, you’re better off renting it.

The cost to see a movie on pay-per-view or video-on-demand is even cheaper, about $3 for satellite and $4 for its inferior cousin, cable TV.

If you can’t wait for the movie to come out on DVD or pay-per-view, you can save by time shifting: going to a matinee or twilight show for considerably less money. One theater chain near my home charges $7.50 for its evening shows, $5.50 for all shows before 4
P.M.,
and $3.75 for all shows that start between 4
P.M.
and 6
P.M.

You also can save money on movie tickets by using discount coupons. One good source is the local coupon books, such as the Entertainment book. Search for a book online, and see if you like the coupon offers. You might be able to buy two movie tickets for the price of one at any AMC theater, or get one ticket for $5 at any General Cinema theater. But the coupons often aren’t good for the first ten days to two weeks of a movie’s run. Check newspaper ads, which may say, “No coupons accepted on this movie.”

There’s no harm in waiting a couple of weeks to see a new movie, and I think it makes more sense to do that. People who go the first weekend have bought into all the hype. People who go after the first couple of weeks are likely not only to get a better price, but to see a better movie, one that has received good word-of-mouth reviews rather than promotion.

The auto club, AAA, sells discount tickets to the major movie chains to its members. Discounts range from 50 cents to $2 off a full-price ticket. The movie chains also sell discount tickets on the Web, but only in packs of twenty or more tickets. They’re aimed at corporations that want to give tickets to employees as incentives.

I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I haven’t been inside a movie theater in five years. It’s funny, because I really enjoy movies, but we tend to watch them either on DVD or one of the premium movie channels. We pay $11 a month and get six or seven channels of HBO, and there are other packages that combine several of the premium channels. If you love movies, paying $11 or so a month for a variety of movies is a good deal.

If you do see a movie in a theater, stay away from the concession counter. That’s the place where movie theaters make most of their money, and you can lose much of yours. People have accused me of sneaking candy into theaters, which just about every theater prohibits. I can’t remember doing that, but I don’t buy refreshments in the theater. I just won’t spend $3 on popcorn that costs the theater five cents, or $3 for a drink that I could buy at a convenience store for 59 cents. If you eat and drink before you go to the movie, the movie will cost a lot less. It’s easy to imagine going to an evening movie and spending $18 on two tickets, and another $15 on popcorn and soda. Why pay $33 when you can enjoy the same movie for $7 to $10 and have lunch or dinner before or after? Or, for your $33, buy two DVDs or rent eleven movies on pay-per-view.

Another thing I don’t do is rent movies from video rental stores, and I have a special dislike for the largest, Blockbuster Video. That’s because of the huge number of complaints we get from people who use Blockbuster’s “drop boxes” to return rented videos. Blockbuster makes an enormous amount of money on late fees. One out of every six dollars it takes in comes from late fees. Some of that just comes from customers not returning movies on time. Other times, it’s the way Blockbuster processes videos that are returned. I saw this myself once, watching as a clerk told the guy in front of me that he owed $4 for returning a movie late. The customer said he had returned the movie on time, placing it into the store’s drop box the night before the noon deadline. But the clerk insisted it was late, that it hadn’t been clocked in until 1:30
P.M.
The customer maintained, correctly, that it isn’t his fault if the movie was returned on time but the store didn’t get around to checking it in until after the deadline. After considerable discussion, the manager waived the fee, but acted as if he was doing the customer a favor.

To avoid this kind of problem, don’t use the honor system to return videos. Hand the video to a clerk and wait until he or she scans it in to record the return.

There’s another way to rent movies that’s a good deal and there are no late fees. With an online service called Netflix (www.netflix.com), you pay a monthly subscription fee of about $20 for basically all the movies you want to rent. When you sign up, you give Netflix a list of the movies you want to rent. They send you DVDs of the first few movies, and when you’re done with one, you mail it back to Netflix in a postage-paid mailer they supply. Then they send you the next movie on your list. You can keep the movies as long as you want, with no late fees—your monthly fee is all you pay. If you’re renting four or five DVDs a month, Netflix is a great alternative. Netflix made enough of an impression that Wal-Mart is launching an online service mimicking Netflix, at about a dollar less per month.

• Tips on Movies •

• Going to an afternoon or twilight movie is considerably cheaper than going at night.
  

• Check coupon books such as Entertainment for movie discounts. The auto club, AAA, also offers discounts to members.
  

• Stay away from overpriced movie-theater concession counters.
  

• A new service, Netflix (www.netflix.com), offers a much better alternative to renting DVDs from the local video store.