Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.
Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.
I hosted a Russian exchange student who really liked joking about that stuff. He went as the ghost of communism for Halloween
I can’t imagine a governor, let alone a governor of a state as populous as Florida, inserting himself into fucking school board elections. Ron, don’t you have anything better to be doing, like, at all? Really? This is the best way to serve the public in your post as governor? What a nincompoop.
Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.
Yeah, I’ve had the experience of paying off a bill, only for the hospital to, about a year later, send us a newly adjusted bill from the same encounter where they discovered we actually owed them a further three hundred. Healthcare is the only field where this kind of shit is tolerated as a routine matter. Any other business doing that would be shamed in town square, but it’s Tuesday for healthcare.
Okay, so the American system is an employer based model, meaning that your health plan, if you have one, is determined by your employer. This means a few key things:
Your plan may (and probably does) vary wildly in nearly every regard from someone else’s despite both of you being with the same insurer.
You are not the customer, but the user. Your boss is the customer. As such, the insurance company doesn’t really care if they piss you off, because you can’t just fire them and go with some other plan. They only care about not pissing off your boss. Well, you can technically, but individual insurance is so expensive and bad (and there’s only a few big players in the market anyway) that it’s an obviously better choice to just get jerked around by your employer’s plan.
The entire healthcare payment process is so arcane, unintuitive, and complex that no lay person outside the system can be really expected to navigate it if someone says “whoops, we’re not paying because the florp code was misapplied during Venus Wednesdays, and though you flipped your florp last month, some businesspeople made a deal just last week to agree that florps will only be covered by approved Todds (the closest is a convenient 600 miles from you). This judgment is final, may God have mercy on your soul.” As an example, I’ve had insurance pre-approve something and then turn around and deny it once it got billed, and because I didn’t think to get physical proof of pre-approval first, the insurance basically just ended it with “nuh uh, we never said that, do you have a receipt?” Lesson learned. And a lot of times, the people inside of it don’t have the full picture. There are people whose entire profession is either arguing with insurance companies all day to force them to pay what’s due, or helping patients navigate the system. It makes it really, really easy to rip off both patients and health providers.
Government insurance like Medicare also sucks. Their reimbursement rates are terrible, among other factors, and it’s caused more and more providers (those who can choose, anyway) to stop seeing these patients, meaning that you start ending up with a few Medicaid clinics whose soonest appointment is months from now and spend about 20 seconds per patient. This is largely a result of our conservatives trying to prove that government doesn’t work by making the government not work. Just so we’re clear, private insurance holders also have long wait times and doctors that are pressed for time, it just tends to be a little less bad.
Since insurers have figured out that there’s money to be gouged in medication, they’ve gotten into the mail order pharmacy and pharmacy Benefit manager (if you want to get a tummy ache, read up on PBMs, they’re the biggest bastards in a field full of absolute bastards) game. Since then, they’ve managed to kill off most small business pharmacies and turn just getting your medication into the same bureaucratic, clown energy pain in the ass as trying to arrange an MRI. (YMMV by insurer, plan, medication, etc)
On top of all that, about a decade or two back, private equity figured out that healthcare in the US is practically a license to print money, so they’ve come in, taken all kinds of stuff over, made everything worse for everyone involved but the businesspeople, all while jacking up prices and cutting services. Yaaaaaaaaay
Dr. Glaucomflecken on YouTube provides a pretty good (and funny / simultaneously infuriating) insight into the mess of healthcare in the US from a providers perspective.
I swear bro, please, I just need one more negotiation where Israel doesn’t even bother showing up. Please, bro, c’mon, bro, just one more negotiation and I swear it’ll work. We can totally get Israel to stop using the weapons we’re giving them if we just wait for the next negotiation, I promise Nettanyahu won’t pull the football back this time, bro, I promise, he promised me and I trust him. He was super cool and promised not to clown on me any more and said he was super sorry. Don’t you get it, bro? He’s changed, we can do this, just give peace one more chance, just
This is a mixed bag. Where I get lukewarm is that I’m convinced it’s going to come down to a shooting fight with the fascists at some point, and I’d rather that the people who are not fascists be able to educate and arm themselves appropriately. Don’t bring sticks and bricks to a gun fight and all that.
Fucking embarrassing tbh. We’re going to decimate the global north because somebody said no to our ethnostate pal.
So here’s my question: what happens when Israel finishes swallowing Palestine and there’s no more land left to steal? What then? Are they going to start shit with Jordan or Egypt to steal their land next? At what point does the US let them know that we’re not going to let them drag us into WW3 just because they need to steal some land.
It’s a regional dialect, that’s what he calls genocide.
I think this is something that private investment can and is handling quite well all on its own before Uncle “Sorry, no money for social security :(” Sam gets involved.
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Oh come on
When I’m in a worst takes competition and my opponents are Lindsey Graham and Dmitrey Medvedev
Woah, woah, woah. Universal healthcare? Fixing homelessness? Trains? That’s crazy talk. We never agree on anything on Washington. Oh, a bill to just shit all over the Constitution and do whatever we want? Lol, we’ll have it done in time for dinner.
Been there. Senior dev told me not to write comments, but write self-documenting code instead.
A really good point I heard is: this was likely a state actor attack, so how many others just like this are out there, undiscovered?
All answers to the FP boil down to one of three Fs.
We’re first, we’re few, or we’re fucked.
No, nothing ever happens, actually. Nobody ever does anything interesting or worth talking about. Hosting exchange kids has, predictably, been one of the most boring experiences of my life, along with everything else.