jimt1234

My Boomer mother has a mild case of shingles. Her health insurance will only pay for an expensive monthly injection. She tried it, but doesn't want it, as she says the side-effects are worse than the shingles. She prefers to apply a cream when she experiences a flare up - maybe, twice per year. Well, her insurance won't pay for the prescription cream; they keep insisting on the monthly injection. She was told if she insists on the cream, she needs to buy it on her own - cost, around $150. Thankfully, we live not far from Mexico, where I can purchase the exact same cream for around $7.

So, it seems the solution to the high cost of prescription drugs in the US is to live near a border. LOL

> Issue #4 examines pharmacy benefit managers ...

I'm curious to read that. I worked for a PBM back in the 90s/early-2000s. When I was hired, it was just a job; I had no idea what the business did to make money. After working there a few years and learning - well, I would've felt better about myself if I had become an actual drug dealer, selling cocaine and meth. That's not a huge exaggeration.

Quarterly reporting didn't seem to hurt Amazon.

I witnessed this devolution with my GF. She's a medical provider in CA that, since the mid-90's, got her funding from a state agency. She met with the agency once per quarter, reviewed her funding claims, worked out any discrepancies one-on-one, in-person with her representative. Worked great. Then private insurance muscled their way in. It's been a bureaucratic nightmare ever since. She had to hire a full-time staffer just to handle all the insurance BS. She never needed that before private insurance.

The nightmare isn't just for her; it's also for her patients. She now spends almost as much time walking her patients through the insurance bureaucracy than she spends on actual treatment. And it's so sad because her patients are so desperate (parents of extremely sick children), but often get nothing but bureaucratic run-around from their private insurers.

So yeah, it's been a lose-lose situation since private insurance took over.

Fat shaming! ... It makes me sad whenever I hear that response to any mention of the health problems associated to obesity.

For me it's just nostalgia. Back when I was a teen in the 80s, we turned on MTV and just left it there, all day, letting them tell us what was cool.

Musk's goal was never to reduce government spending or waste. It was to get unrestrained access to government spending data to serve his own goals.

It's a conspiracy theory - I don't have any real evidence to support it, but I tend to believe it.

I wonder why "Private education and health services" is down so much. My guess is because federal cuts to health services impacted jobs???

Expect to hear a lot about trans people in the upcoming months. Republicans won't wanna talk about tariffs, war, gas prices, inflation, unemployment, health care, or anything else that matters. But yeah, trans kids are playing in youth sports! ... And, unfortunately, it'll work. I'm not optimistic about the upcoming mid-term elections.

But...Hunter Biden's laptop!!!

Isn't this essentially what MAGA argued during the fighting over the 2020 election - that the states should be able to run their elections however-the-fvck they want, and the feds have no right tell the states how to run their elections?

I've been trying to avoid the news for a little over a year now. I needed a detox. ... Is this true? That is, are there legitimate proposals to cancel or constrain the November elections in any significant way? Or, is this all speculation?

The administration has no tolerance for anyone...who refuses to get their knees dirty.

So now I have to prove who I am just to use something I purchased? Am I gonna have to prove my age/identity to my new laundry machine (it runs on OS)?

Yes, an awesome victory. But I believe a tech solution is gonna be superior to any legal solution. Any data considered "private and sensitive" should be accessible only by the person who owns it. Full stop.

I grew up in the 80s, not far from Times Beach, Missouri, so I'm a huge supporter of environmental protection. Hooray for California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

https://www.epa.gov/mo/town-flood-and-superfund-looking-back...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ElM_xAtbAY

Leave Notepad alone!

( In case you forgot: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vw1rMkUFqyc )

What's the over-under for Trump mentioning this in the State Of The Union speech tonight? The timing of this release can't be a coincidence.

Don't forget that teachers these days are also expected to be active shooter experts, ready to literally put their own lives on the line.

After graduation my high-school-best-friend and I took different paths. He got heavily into partying and drugs, and started doing crimes to pay for his addictions. First major conviction was for stolen credit cards. Second conviction was for check fraud. His third major conviction was for breaking into rich people's houses and stealing loose crap like golf clubs, power tools and bicycles. Missouri had just passed its version of the then-popular Three Strikes law, and this latest conviction was his third strike. He was fast-passed to a 20-year sentence, no opportunity for early release.

I'm not going to preach about my friend being a victim of a cruel system or whatever. He deserved to be punished, no doubt about it. He committed crimes; there were victims to those crimes. My feeling, however, is that the people of Missouri are the victims, the taxpayers. They had to pay to jail a dude for 20 years (they paid for his college education, too, through some sort of convict-college program). I'm confident there's a better way to punish/rehabilitate non-violent offenders that doesn't cost the tax payers 20 years of jailing.

Funny-not-funny tidbit: My friend was released in early-2021. He was released after serving 20 years, only to be "locked down" on the outside because of Covid.

I can't understand how anyone can do such a job for any length of time. I worked at a PC repair shop back in the 90s, fixed some dude's PC, and I saw a bunch of CSAM stuff (a lot, like thousands of pics, all children). I reported it to the local cops, then the FBI got involved, and that's the last I heard of it. My point is that the memory of those pics haunt me to this day. And I only saw a handful of pics, over, maybe, a period of about 2 minutes. To do that all day, everyday - how could one not become an alcoholic?

I thought Ring was already sending data to law enforcement agencies (that paid Amazon for it). Also, I thought the EULA included language that basically said, "All your data are belong to us", so they could already do whatever surveillance they want.

We, the America-hating liberals, have been warning about these "administrative subpoenas" for years, but we've always been blocked with "So, we're all gonna have wait for a judge to sign a warrant before we can stop the next 9/11?!"

I've said it before on HN, but it's worth repeating: When my parents started a family in the late-60's, my dad had only a high school diploma, yet he supported his wife, 2 kids, 2 cars, and a brand new house. Heck, one of their cars was a 1964 convertible Corvette (my mom still talks about how much she misses that car). That is basically unheard-of these days.

- I'm Crash Override. - You're the moron that's been invading my turf?!

This might be relevant to the timing here: https://eletric-vehicles.com/waymo/waymo-exec-admits-remote-...

He's looking for air cover from MAGA, trying to get on Trump's radar. Flock is law-and-order. DeFlock is Antifa.

Not sure I understand this comment. Trump deserves points for being transparent about his disdain for liberal democratic values? Not sure that's a flex. Hmmm.

I feel really old now. :(