Pool_1

the toe crackers over there. When Jeff Malin called him.. he actually called Ivory, Marcus.. when Malin called Ivory, the man went ballistic. Jeff said that he'd best not quote Dr. Ivory, for everybody's sake. Shannon did quote her own Ivoryism, after a bit, when Macaluso was calmer. He had said, "Those ass holes have less brains than frogs have tits." From this Mac began mumbling about more news worthy literary references, Saint Giles of the Lilly Pad, or Agatha of the Tarsal Callosity, then began, with two arms and his face held high, an unintelligible chant to Saint Gereon. Shannon tried diversions without much luck. Over Mac calling down curses in the names of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, she asked, "You hear? ProtectiBlue is raising their rates thirty to fifty percent! They jammed it through the senate. Amazing. They showed their projected indebtedness as insolvent." She had picked up that nugget on one of her jaunts to the state house. More purged by fatigue than in reaction to her diversion he relented. "Hell, Shannon, that's no surprise. They lost nearly all of their investor's money. Real estate speculation. Those bastards were into land and commercial building deals, big time. Big pot of gold? Hah. Big pot of hot snot 'tsall they got. They made huge investments and the bottom dropped out. That's where the debt came from. It had nothing to do with medicine. In fact that's how two thirds of these damned organizations got started. Ask John, he'll tell you, they're devouring medical funding to offset their losses from high risk speculation investments. Total scam. Offer ten percent reductions in price but give fifty percent less product. Put the difference in high risk or flat out illegal schemes. It's a blood sucking frenzy. People are not on guard against confidence schemes in medical insurance. They plop down their their money and they think they actually have something. I wonder how many of them could prove - actually document -