Microblog Memes

Just imagine living in a first world country where they provide free Netflix instead of maintaining an insanely large military.

Americans are amazing. Their healthcare system is literally killing them and ruining their families, and they keep talking about how bad "socialism" is...

The amount of bullshit this people buy is incredible.

and the rest of the economy is heading in this direction soon. Rent seeking needs to be outlawed

Universal healthcare is so hard that only 32 of the 33 highly developed countries in the world do it.

How about when the website explicitly says your subscription covers Stranger Things, but you watch Stranger Things, and they then bill you $80.

Then you follow the steps to dispute it on their website. And they say they didn't make any mistakes. Then you do the follow-up appeal via snail-mail and they say that there's still nothing wrong.

(My experience with UHC and a cholesterol test)

In Taiwan, I pay for Universal Healthcare because I own a business. 5800nt(185usd) every 2 months for a familyof 4. It would be 3000nt(100usd)for 2 months if it's just myself.

The copay is 10usd for everything. Fever? Food poisoning? Chemotherapy? All the same cost. This includes all the medications and all incidental costs.

If you worked for a Taiwan company, you don't have to pay the 5800nt. But the copay is the same.

So this sucks but you can avoid this with a simple trick. Call your insurance company first with the CPT codes for what you need done and where you plan to get it done. Your doctors office can give you the codes. They aren’t a trade secret or anything. Get diagnoses codes too if you can. Have the insurance company run the codes for you before you go. This does a couple things:

1. You verify everyone involved is in network (be wary of anesthesiologists)
2. You are getting a quote on a recorded line. The end price won’t be exact (especially is if the claim involves a hospital, fuck them, go to smaller providers whenever you can)
3. if you get sticker shock anyway, you can call the insurance company back on that same recorded line and say the word “misquote”. This triggers an investigation that can strengthen your appeal.
4. You now have evidence you can file internally with a quality of care/quality of service complaint if the provider did something shady with the billing, or with your state’s department of insurance if your insurance company is being bitchy.

Ideally, we would have single payer insurance, but we instead have a government that pays itself to make private enterprise do its job, then the shareholders in that private enterprise make sure nothing ever gets changed. -sigh-

In the mean time, if you really want to fuck them over, consider switching to health insurance company that does not have shareholders. In many states, they are legally mandated to refund any profit they make over a certain percentage at the end of the year and without shareholders, it’s harder to hide the money, which puts much more pressure on them to spend it on patient care.

United Health Care want you to believe their way is the only way to do this. They are wrong. A shareholder-free insurer still isn’t perfect but the pressures are different without the parasites.

I hear you. How does one pirate health insurance?

It's not stupid, it's nefarious. Free Luigi!

It's much worse because you can choose not to watch Netflix but you don't have much choice if you are sick.

It's more like receiving a bill for songs you hear on the radio in the grocery store, on the bus, in other people's cars passing by. You didn't ask for the benefit, could not really negotiate it, but it was useful to you when you got it. You could maybe avoid it by not leaving your house.

So... Pirate?

/j

Fuck the American healthcare system and fuck Netflix

After recently apartment hunting, I have a (slightly tangential) gripe to add on here.

When I was getting my income verification (to prove I could afford the proposed rent), it went off gross income - what you make before taxes and so-called “benefits” are taken out. The hundreds I pay each month for the “benefit” of being insured make a significant difference between what I make and what I take home. Do I make 3x a given rent? Well technically, by gross income, I do. But my net income is where that rent payment comes from, so the chunk of my take-home going toward rent is absolutely higher than 1/3 of the net income I can actually use.

I have no choice but to pay for this “benefit.” Notice I keep using quotation marks. That’s because I think the term is bullshit. I think a work-sponsored benefit should be something work provides. Yeah, maybe they got a “deal” to offer insurance to employees for lower than it’d cost to buy for ourselves, but come on. If work really wanted to call it a “benefit,” they should pay us more so the numbers even out on our take-home. We’re forced into these situations, yet employers have the nerve to use a term that implies they’re offering some special bonus to us.

Okay, enough ranting for now. No, wait - prescriptions! That’s another health-related cost that isn’t deducted, that I still have to pay for, despite having insurance.

The screws keep tightening around us workers and there’s no escape. I really hope Mamdani sparks inspiration across the country, because this shit is untenable.