Credit Cards

AP - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.

Credit cards have moved on to become almost a necessity today. Its rare to find people having no credit card. In fact most of the people have more than one credit card. However, possessing a credit card is not enough. You also need to understand how to use it properly. Sometimes credit cards can become a pain e.g. when you get into a debt trap.

The first thing to understand is the fact that credit card is not free money or a goldmine that you just discovered. Its simply a loan that you are taking from a bank or a financial institution and you need to pay it back soon. You must understand that if you dont pay this amount back in time you will have to pay an interest on the amount. This interest is calculated using APR (annual percentage rate) i.e. the interest rate charged on the outstanding balance on your credit card account. This is calculated and applied on a monthly basis. APR is one of the key features one considers when choosing a credit card.

As soon as you receive your credit card, read through all the instructions provided on it. Thing like protection against fraud, reporting loss of credit card, reporting incorrect charges, fees & other charges, contact information, change of address instructions etc are all on there. You might like to keep a note of contact numbers separate from your credit card especially the one for reporting lost credit card. Do not leave important things like signing on the back of credit card for later.

Take note of various types of fee/charges etc that you can incur. You will find that the fee/commission on using some of the features is very restrictive e.g. withdrawing cash using credit cards is a sure no-no unless you are in a very difficult situation and that is the only option left before you. There is hefty charge/fee on cash withdrawals. Similarly, transactions in other currencies end up being a bit expensive too (not too much though).

Develop good spending habits by refraining from using your credit card all the time. Use cash if you seem to be approaching your credit limit on the card. In fact try not to breach 70% mark on the credit limit. This should act as a warning against credit card debt trap.

Also, its imperative that you understand the importance of credit ratings. This is the rating which keeps developing in the background as you use your credit card. If you dont pay on time you get negative points for it and if you pay regularly and do not overspend, you get positive points. This rating is developed by various credit bureaus on the basis of information received from credit card companies and is available to all other financial institutions and banks on request. So, when you apply for a mortgage or a car loan or for that matter a new credit card, the bank/institution gets your credit rating from the credit bureau as the first thing. If you have a good rating, the things will go smoothly for you and if you have a bad rating then you might be denied that mortgage that you were eagerly looking forward to. Thus this rating is used to ascertain your credibility and you must try and maintain a good credit rating always. In fact, credit cards are a good way of developing a good credit rating.

A proper understanding of credit cards will thus help you in using them properly and to the best of your interests.

Rudy Hadisentosa: CCN.com is a free online credit cards review and application website. We offer credit cards selection from visa,master cards, discover, american express and many others. We have quite some categories and hundreds of credit cards selection to fit your need. Apply for a credit card at CCN.com.

# posted by cc76314 @ 9:09 PM 0 comments

Reuters - China sought on Sunday to contain an outpouring of nationalism triggered by protests along the route of the Olympic torch relay, with state media urging people to channel their patriotism into "rational" expressions.

Dr. John looked at the computer screen and felt nauseated: only half of the claims that he submitted for payment three months ago were paid. At two AM, Dr. John sat wide awake worried about what went wrong with his billing and about the future of his chiropractic office. Yesterday Pat, his billing assistant, seemed especially upset. Dr. John tried to remember her smile. She knew everything there is to know about billing when she arrived at his office doorstep three years ago. He caught himself thinking that Pat's moods were even less predictable than his wife's.

Was he wise to open an office? Why is he unable to get paid in full for his work? His revenues have not changed in the past two years, yet it looks like he will finish this year lower than last year. That's assuming he doesn't get audited. Though Dr. John couldn't recall any of the audit statistics recited by the speaker at the Association's presentation, he clearly remembered that the trend looked ominous; the likelihood of being audited seemed to match the likelihood of being involved in a car accident. Yet no insurance company covers audit risk...Is it because you always end up paying back when audited?

Dr. John thought again about the striking similarities of the information processing mechanisms between the chiropractic office and the human organism. Both the human body and the chiropractic office are complex information systems, where the flow of information must be uninhibited in order to have them growing at a healthy pace. The office, just like the human body, must perform its vital functions optimally to grow and to avoid risks.

In the "human body-chiropractic office" analogy, the CNS is not just the software that facilitates such functions or the office staff that performs these functions using the software, and it's not just the procedures that the office staff follows when performing these functions using the software. The CNS concept unites all three components of information flow management, including procedures, technology, and staff who follow the procedures and use the technology that results in the desired behavior. The CNS is:

• Comprehensive - The CNS covers every aspect of a physician's practice, starting with patient scheduling, registration, documentation, and billing.
• Timely - The CNS responds in real time: collections are updated as they arrive, coding advice is dispatched at the time of SOAP note entry, the patient is questioned about outstanding balance at the time of appointment registration, the compliance with care plan is reviewed at the time of the doctor's appointment, and questions between billing and front office personnel are resolved online.
• Intelligent - The CNS synthesizes new information from available data to make suggestions to the physician about potential audit exposure due to over-coding or about potential applicability of a treatment or a vitamin because another patient with similar history used it and received positive results.
• Self-Improving - The CNS shares practice management and billing knowledge across all the providers on the entire network. Every new chiropractor that joins the network, benefits from all others that already joined before. So the value that the office receives from being a part of the network keeps growing with each additional office. Such an expanding community-driven effect has been documented by amazon.com, yahoo, and flickr and it's called "network effect."
• Accountable - The CNS has built-in "memory" that keeps tabs of every claim and of every action on it so that the entire billing process is tracked: form coding to claim submission, payment posting to follow-up.
• Transparent - The CNS has a built-in continuous measurement process, collecting and communicating information about patients waiting, payments paid, etc.
• Proactive - The CNS generates symptoms and directions automatically and independently of the staff. It discovers underpayments and delays or patients that left the office without billing and alerts the front-office staff about problems.
• Intuitive - The CNS generates simple and easy to understand signals that require simple decisions, such as "correct the ICD-9," or "call the insurance company," or "request patient demographics."
• HIPAA-compliant - The CNS delivers the information on the "need to know" basis only.
• Universal - The CNS provides every participant in the billing process, including patient, provider, payer, and biller, with access to every aspect of the billing process.
• Continuous - The CNS makes process detail available continuously on a 24 x 7 basis.
• Ubiquitous - The CNS provides access to billing process over a secure standard Internet browser that requires no special hardware or software and is available everywhere.
• Scalable - The CNS makes both the big picture and minute detail available for scrutiny universally and continuously. The big picture consists of total cash flow in a given time period, current submitted and failed claims, and billing quality metric. It must contain a comprehensive summary of patient visits and unpaid balances. The minute detail pertains to individual claims making up the big picture, including a complete history from the moment of creating the claim, testing its validity and eligibility, making corrections, performing submissions, reconciling payer messages and explanations of benefits (EOB) with original claims, until payment. Both perspectives must allow for an arbitrary aggregation of claims and drill in detail to enable effective follow-up.

Know any health care providers who complain about shrinking insurance payments and increasing audit risk? Help them learn winning Internet strategies for the modern payer-provider conflict by steering them to http://www.BillingPrecision.com - The CNS for the Chiropractic Office, home of "Practicing Profitability - Billing Network Effect for Revenue Cycle Control in Healthcare Clinics and Chiropractic Offices: Collections, Audit Risk, SOAP Notes, Scheduling, Care Plans, and Coding" book by Yuval Lirov, PhD and inventor of patents in artificial intelligence and computer security.

# posted by cc76314 @ 8:54 AM 0 comments