@jextxadore If you have alignment and color suggestions, send 'em my way. :)
@blumenkraft Health insurance is very heavily regulated. It's less a free market issue and more regulatory capture here, I think, with a side helping of a mostly paralyzed legislative apparatus and a populace that is virulently against thinking through an issue in terms of facts and having a reasoned discussion. I live in a land of shallow soundbites.
That said, I definitely agree that leaving health care up to the free market is an awful idea.
Unfortunately, it's not a simple matter of regulated yes/no or even government-run yes/no but rather quality and effectiveness and fundedness of regulation and operation. But that means it requires nuance, and this demos (pretend that's in Greek alphabet) very much does not do, indeed is suspicious of, nuance.
// @tomas @keita @dgold
@jussipekonen Tomas' is public. CatChat. I think it's catchat.snipergirl.com, but don't quote me on that. And I'm sure he'll correct me when daytime rolls around in his neck of the woods again. :)
// @tomas @thedan84 @neilco
@dgold If only. :\ We had to go out of our way to find a midwifery practice. Luckily Atlanta now has a few.1
We also retained a private doula (worth her weight in gold during the almost 48-hour labor we had with #1).
And then most of our public schools are awful, and even private school options are mostly expensive and still not so great, so wrestling with what to do for schooling for #1 even as #2 is just about to arrive in a few weeks (expected 25 Feb).
Our cautionary advice to my siblings has basically been, "Once you have kids, you begin hemorrhaging money, so bear that in mind as you choose housing etc."
// @blumenkraft @tomas @keita
The laws on midwifery vary a lot from state to state, and public awareness of them as even an option remains pretty poor.
@neilco None I know of. I have one for iOS named Macchiato [macchiato.10centuries.org], as does @thedan84 named Ristretto. @jussipekonen is working on a few. @matigo of course has Cappuccino [chat.10centuries.org] and the admin interface. And @thrrgilag has Blurbybot on Telegram (I don't know any URL for that) and I think also an integration for whatever is running Monkeystew. And @bazbt3 had a client at some point as well I think?
@jussipekonen Wait — apps, plural? What you got up your sleeve over there? :excited:
@tomas Oh god you have no idea. No-one can tell you what a damn thing will cost upfront; it's just "well, do it, and we'll see what it shakes out as!"
We called our insurance about what we'd owe for a birth. Found we'd max out individual deductible for mother and newborn child at $500 each. Hospital collected that. Then insurance tells us a month or so later that actually we only owed the $500 for mother, and hospital ended up refunding us $500.
Then the lab that did the blood work tries to balance bill us (bill us for the amount the insurance did not pay, in contravention of their agreement with the insurer as part of the network), claiming they were out of network, but they weren't. Insurance finally got them to shut up.
And then, 18 months later, we find out the anesthesiologist at this in-network hospital actually was out-of-network. Apparently this is common. And is known as "surprise billing". We ended up paying the sizable chunk of change that our insurance didn't cover rather than having them send it to collections, which would likely end up cheaper but more annoying and damaging to credit score.
It's a total cock-up of a health "care" system that makes me want to stay as far away from it as possible because nothing good can come of interacting with it, only heartache and awful surprises.
// @blumenkraft @keita @dgold