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Anastasis

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Anastasis

  1. Emergency situations are clearly different scenarios, but if you have to shop an non-emergent outpatient MRI for example, some gd pricing transparency would be nice.
  2. Absolutely negotiate, esp when it involves an inpatient admission and in most cases when it involves an ER encounter or certain outpatient services. Wife was admitted back in Jan. We got initial bills totally ~$90k. Lots of stupid in there. We were on the hook for I think like $6k (on a HDHP). Told her to file away any bills that come in for the next couple months and don't send them shit until the adjudication process work out. Haven't done the math on the final out of pocket, but it is somewhere under $2500. Fucking ERs are a racket with their in/out of network provider bullshit. I've had ED docs look at me like I have three heads when I asked them to confirm that their provider group was in-network before rendering services. I've also had to bend over and enjoy it when your fn 2 year old needs a lumbar puncture and you have no other realistic emergent option, so you have to negotiate the fees on the back end. If you have a reasonable basis for pushing back on the charges, they will settle for dimes on the dollar. I settled probably a couple thousand in bills for cardiac monitoring device for my son at the beginning of COVID. Figured they needed the money and would make a deal so we made them an offer that I thought was more than reasonable considering the device never transmitted and required a professional interpretation of the data. They accepted and closed the account. What we need is a system that requires pricing transparency, incentivize price competition, and backstops against catastrophic events. There are relatively straightforward ways to get there, at least conceptually. Too many interests vested in the current system though.
  3. OK, well that had nothing to do with me and nothing to do with my exchange with 956, so one might wonder why he is suggesting that it did.
  4. Yeah, that's not an accurate depiction of how that went and I have no idea what you are referring to with the "be careful, this reporter is Jewish" bit, but it certainly did not come from anything I posted. Sorry you ran here to push out a tweet and that the WH had to walk back what Biden said because it didn't hang with reality.
  5. Use to hit the place up all the time after happy hour at the real Cloak Room.
  6. BREAKING: Biden tells heads of the U.S. Jewish organizations: “It matters that Americans see what is happening. I have doing this a long time – I never thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children” And here is the walkback: The thing is, unlike most of the social media accounts you quote, you actually know what atrocity propaganda is, and what purpose it serves. There are plenty of atrocities taking place right now. Legit beheadings on film, dead elderly shot up in their laundry room, dead babies being pulled out of rubble and cribs in hospitals full of dead children. And there may very well turn up evidence of beheaded babies, for christ's fucking sake. But you're running some extreme and inflammatory claims at the tip of the spear in real time, and you know exactly what it is intended to stoke. Same play as W's Iraqi babies in incubators story. Can you just act for a second like there are actually some of us that have an attention span longer than a decade.
  7. Still think this is a bit.
  8. Those with the means left a long time ago. First the Christians, then the educated class of the Muslims. What remains reflects the "brain drain" and a population of people that have literally no options in front of them. And to be totally fair, the fucking Arab countries around them have absolutely zero interest in providing anything that looks like opportunity to them.
  9. I see. The palestinians have been under military occupation the entire time frame indicated. The WB is carved up into non-contiguous areas with hundreds of checkpoints where the people that live there are systematically dehumanized. They literally live with boots on their necks. But yes, the blockade of Gaza has certainly taken things to another level.
  10. But seriously, I would like to understand how the situation on the ground between 66-08 is somehow a period where the Palestinian people were not under military occupation with a boot on their necks. I assume that it was just an ahistorical throw away argument, but maybe there is something substantive there that I am missing.
  11. The IDF has already stated that they don't have any evidence to confirm and will not investigate the claims, and that the accounts of their people are sufficient. The oz tweet thread linked was pushing back on the notion that the claims originated from one particular reporter, making the argument that the reporter was only relaying what they were told by one of the Israeli rescue workers. It's amazing how this fact pattern is being deployed.
  12. I think that you dismiss #4 too easily. If we are going to assign broadly to the palestinians the words of their extremists, maybe we should do the same with the other side. Stick a mic in front of a WB settler and you will hear some outright calls for genocide. Shit, put a mic in front of their PM or their defense minister and you will get essentially the same.
  13. Some posters here must have really struggled in history class.
  14. Their power had been cut off and their cell phones are dead but text messages were supposedly sent while they bombed the rafah crossing where civilians were staging to avoid the bombing areas. This makes sense to people.
  15. Those videos are out there. They don't enter his information stream. Just like the videos of non-violent protests at the Gaza prison walls, where the IDF opened fire on unarmed protestors doing what all the "where is their Gandhi" people want, do not get the same play.
  16. LOL. You realize that people that are not just as sunk and committed to acting like Ned Jr. can read these posts, right?
  17. I am sure that you think that a tweet characterizing what is playing out here by couching this in condescending terms terms as a glorious resistance and "tHiS iS WhAt dEcOloNiZaTiOn lOoKs lIKe" followed up by disinformation is compelling and insightful, but it is pretty much what most people paying attention would expect from state department talking points. No mirrors in your world, huh. I do appreciate the neg though, must have triggered some self-awareness.
  18. [wildcat]huh, look at who is cheering on genocide[/wildcat] And look who is cheering on disinformation operations.
  19. They call this "Thursday at a Checkpoint" in the West Bank.
  20. At least they didn't send Jake Sullivan.
  21. Why shouldn't I? The West did a long time ago. In the same way that they have forgotten most of the Christians in the Middle East. Those people are not nearly as useful to American hegemonic policy interests as turning a blind eye to illegal settlements and the people that want to build the Third Temple and a well lit landing strip for Dispensationalist Jesus in J-town.
  22. 2023 world looks like a neo-con wet dream.
  23. This is no basis for a rational foreign policy, but here we are. *second carrier group transits the Med*
  24. Well I can tell you based on significant first hand experience that this is total horseshit.
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