I’m terminally ill… have been since I was conceived.
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CA is off the rails on stuff. The store my wife and son own sells thousands of things that all have the “may cause cancer” labels.
Anyone who has ever painted a model or used any model paints, glues, etc. can only be alive yet because they do NOT live in CA.
I’m sure that is why they are so protective of everyone coming across the border – they need to replace all the people that are croaking from being exposed to all those dangerous items…
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I HAD some nice reusable sodium acetate supersaturation hand warmers. Until last night, when I set the pot on the stove to recharge them, forgot about it, and went across the house for something else. Now I have a charred mess, a lot of open windows, and a pot in the trash.
I am fine! I am also wondering how I’m a functional adult.
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Something like this has probably happened to most of us. After I cremated a chicken in a copper bottom Revere Ware pot, we instituted a rule that the kitchen light must be on if the stove is on, and I think it has helped.
The copper peeled off…
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ACA put the nail in the coffin of many of those plans, but they were already severely wounded by the states they operated in before ACA.
I spent many years in group plans sponsored by professional orgs. In the earliest years, the insurance companies had free reign to set premiums based on the history of claims by the org members in the plan.
In Massachusetts, the state regulators when faced by rising premiums in individual plans limited and then eliminated the ability of insurers to use the history of claims in the plan to set premiums requiring that history be combined with individual plans to help lower their cost.
Over the same period, there was an increase in mandated coverages, similar to ACA mandates. One year our premiums rose 20% with no significant increase in the claims history of our plan.
Regulators choose winners and losers based on their opinion of what is the public good. Whether you agree they have succeeded in their assessment of the public good is often colored by whether you have won or lost.
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We were, for several years before the ACA, insured through an alumni group plan from my graduate program.
It was cheap but crummy coverage, and they refused taking my son back on after studying in the UK, and being covered by the NHS for four years, since we had, “no proof of coverage.”
Finding docs in NYC who would accept this BCBS plan was akin to begging with a tin cup.
Medicare has been a welcome relief. I want us all to have it.
For those who think Medicare for All would increase taxes, I remind you we are spending nearly 20% of our GNP on healthcare. Surely we will save money by removing insurance companies from our costs: Medicare overhead is about 3%, while insurance companies are limited by law to taking only 20% off the top.
The insurance executive who was shot on the street about 20 minutes walk from where I live was paid 10 million a year–for what?
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It is not clear to me that medicare for all would not cause the total collapse of out health care system.
Every month I read the statements that Medicare and my Medigap insurer send me.
My wife had a trip to the ER a couple of months back. The rack rate bill sent was $21K. Medicare paid $1.2k, my insurer about $200 and we paid $50.
The initial amount is what some uninsured individual would have been asked to pay. A health insurance company would have had to may more than Medicare did. Even medicaid would pay more.
I doubt if the Medicare payment covers burdened costs. Everyone else is paying more because Medicare is paying so little.
When I had my bypass surgery, and post op care, provider billing was over $500k. payments from all sources did not reach 6 digits.
There is a reason national health systems have to ration care, the governments of those countries cannot afford the costs of providing care to all in need.
A couple of years back the Wall Street Journal attempted to get some major hospitals to share their costs of providing certain services to a patient. Not their charges, but what it cost them. The hospital admitted that they could not allocate their costs to the particular services.
There are many flaws in our health care system, but medicare for all would probably be fatal to many individuals and institutions.
For those who have issues with the costs of the ACA this would be much, much worse. And the cut taken by the insurance companies might prove to be insignificant.
ACA was devised by people who understood that medicare for all was economically impossible, even if they wanted it. And some of the people who wrote the ACA wanted medicare for all.
The political posturing might not be representative of the beliefs of the opposing interests, but what they feel serves their own agendas.
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I have no problems with leaving the pots on the stove on, but I do have problems with leaving the oven on.
Our oven is a convection oven and usually takes less than the time in recipes to cook, even when we lower the temperature 25 degrees.
So we do not use the oven timer, but use the timer which does not turn the oven off,
This adds a manual step to cooking, and we rely on creating visual cues to remind us to turn the oven off. Sometimes it is not cleaning up as the cooking process proceeds. A mess of dirty pots and bowls and empty packages is often an effective reminder.
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My cooing skills are such that those visual clues may end up in the mass of smoke as well as the smoke alarm making a racket. I would remove the batteries but when we built the house they hard wired it!
Not an ideal design if there is a power outage…
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We too have hardwired smoke detectors which I am known to set off when I cook. Fortunately, my stove is vetted to the outside, and I run the fan on the stove.
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Hope your cataract surgery went well.
I had permanent far-sight (expensive) lenses placed into my eyes during cataract surgery -some of the best $$ ever spent. Didn’t do anything much for myopia- I’m still nearly blind when reading close-up and have to whip corrective lenses from the top of my head or from a decorative chain hanging from my neck when reading from a page.(Can read from a good-size monitor without corrective lenses, too!!)
BUT can now drive without contacts/glasses for the first time since I was 15- over half a century. Way over. Way, way over..
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I did the same. I never had good luck with bifocals so i only got the single strength lenses put in. Now I (almost, but not quite) wish that I had done the bifocal implants that are available.
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My severely myopic eyes didn’t qualify for the bifocal implants. I’d still have to ■■■■■■ the “cheaters” from my head or from around my neck -the reason I never had the LASIK surgery, either.
My blessed parents “invested” in contact lenses for me in the 60’s-and, eventually, insurance covering lost ones-as a way to prevent my eyesight from becoming worse. I often enlivened change-of class-by screaming-”Don’t– it’s my contact!! and hitting the floor to hunt frantically for the precious lens that had just popped out.
Now I only have to hit CVS/Walgreens for inexpensive cheaters rather than enriching the opticians/optometrists w/ my unusual/difficult-to-locate prescriptions!
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So far it’s great; before the surgery, I had to stop driving at night, as a single headlight appeared to be about 5. And I had to get close (about 6’) to the TV to read scores, etc. Now with the new eye, no glare, and can see the pixels on the TV from the sofa (so now gotta upgrade to 4K; more expenses I didn’t expect!)
The other eye gets done on Monday.
BTW, got “extended range” lenses, so can see distance and mid-range; I might need readers, but too early to say, as things are still setting down.
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This must be the season. I had my first cataract surgery last week. The other eye will be done in January. So far so good. My distance vision has improved and colors are still getting used to their new normal.
I’ve started to drive without my glasses, even at night. Tonight was a little more tricky because of dense fog. Even though I stayed on roads that I’ve driven a gazillion times, the heavy fog made everything appear different.
Best wishes for your upcoming surgery @Picks_by_Nisha
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I’m an avid reader of diaries, any diaries or letter collections but especially literary/ military or political figures. Yawn, many of my contemporaries might say but to me, it’s a living window into the past.
All of us having these easy-peasy eye surgeries just a part being a certain age and, for those of us who are having these wonderful sight-giving, lenses implanted, income-level in 21st-century America
Samuel Pepys, who is reading/writing by expensive wax candlelight in the 17th century assumed he was going blind so had to stop writing his randy tell-all after 10 years. He was a Secretary of the British Navy and had to hand-write many documents. He eventually hired a secretary for his business letters but even he, who poured out his most intimate thoughts/actions in the diaries, without, apparently, embarrassment, couldn’t stomach doing it to a third party! The actions he took to protect his vision are heart-breaking. Ben Franklin, too, who popularized the bi-focal so he could learn French as the American Ambassador to France when in his 70’s (an equivalent age in 1776, where the avg. death age was a mere 35, to mid-80’s now),
Even in mid-20th century, diarist “Chips” Channon, an American turned British socialite, who married into the Guinness Brewery family and was an M.P during the 1930’s-40’s-50’s, writes about royalty/wealthy having cataract surgeries that fail or one clouded eye or being near-blind. So let’s be thankful for 21st-century Ophthalmic surgery! I personally have an eye-surgeon, trained at the Methodist Hospital in Houston. How he came to AZ, only a few miles from my home is a puzzle, but he was fast/incredibly skilled!! Course, he’s making a bundle here- a 3-4 month wait to get an appointment, where there are so many retirees but I don’t begrudge the man his success!!
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@Picks_by_Nisha is having another cataract surgery, today, I believe. Hope all goes well-and that you or your accompanying driver don’t have to fight bad weather in the process.
Though we lived in Colorado for 17 years and fought every type of inclement weather while driving to employment or chauffeuring children to their extra-curriculars–not sure I could do it now. I complain a lot about Southern AZ- but more than a quarter-century of boringly “fine” or hellishly hot weather, has spoiled us, drive-wise.
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The snow is not supposed to start until 5 PM EST, so Nisha should be fine. Wishing him well. Almost everyone I know who had cataract surgery speaks well of it.
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Other eye surgery is not until Monday, so hopefully weather not an issue.
Having moved here from AZ, I explain to people that every place has 2 months of lousy weather; but I never had to shovel “hot”.
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Those of us who grew up on a farm / ranch would tend to think you left a word off of that statement.
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