A Little Visual Perspective on the $87 billion being spent on Iraq

http://www.xinjo.com/interesting/a-little-visual-perspective-on-the-87-billion-being-spent-on-iraq/

Government health insurance > private insurance companies

There, I said it.

I’m a pharmacy tech. I have plenty of complaints about medicare and medicaid, but they still underpay claims by a smaller margin than the insurance companies do.

And they keep us on hold for less time.

And the customer reps speak English.

And they don’t keep us on hold for 45 minutes then say, “You have to call this number instead, even though you dialed the correct number listed on the back of the insurance card.” Then you call the second number, wait on hold another 45 minutes, with Aaron Neville music playing the entire time, before a computer recording cuts in to say, “Our offices are now closed. Our business hours are . . .”

If you think your insurance company gives you bad customer service, take a wild guess how they treat the drug stores that aren’t even their customers. And if we tell you not to use that insurance because they’re jerks, we can be shut down by the feds for “price fixing.” Guess which group of lobbyists got that put on the books?

And medicaid’s a little less likely to pretend like they know what the patient needs better than a doctor would.

And they don’t charge us $4 just to submit a claim for processing and another $2 to reverse the claim (costing us $6 for a script that we never filled or got paid anything for).

And they don’t threaten to withhold $80,000 worth of claims because we sold a desperate, uninsured patient a prescription for 58 cents less than the insurance company paid for it. Because it’s a contract violation to sell even one prescription to a patient for even one penny less than the insurance company would pay, but charging the cash patients three times more is . . . okay?

And at least medicaid has one-time override codes so you can fill a non-preferred antibiotic for an infant on Saturday morning instead of trying to get a prior authorization maybe by next Wednesday if you’re lucky and you sacrifice enough chickens to Baron Samedi.

Guy earning 20K/year saves 500K, teaches others

Via msn:

Earl Crawley, 69, better known as Mr. Earl, earns $20,000 a year as a parking-lot attendant. But he has amassed a stock portfolio worth more than $500,000.

You have cancer? That’s expensive. You’re fired.

Via channel3000:

SPARTA, Wis. — A Sparta woman who said she was fired because she has breast cancer has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Angie Arttus said her life was turned upside down in less than a week. She said she was diagnosed with breast cancer, informed her supervisor at Dura-Tech Industries in La Crosse, then met with a human resource manager who asked her to resign.

She can’t qualify for medicaid in Wisconsin because she doesn’t have kids, is not pregnant, is older than 18 and younger than 65, and is not yet totally disabled by SSI’s standards. These are the requirements for medicaid in most states, by the way. Next time you or someone you know is complaining about welfare babies, keep in mind that reproductively responsible adults usually can’t get so much as a $17 rescue inhaler from our government.

Health Savings Accounts

I have an HSA. It’s not a flex plan. The money is mine, in a high-interest savings account, and it rolls over every year. I put before-tax dollars into it, then keep track of all my eligible expenses throughout the year. I charge them to a 0% credit card (paying the minimum plus $1) while the HSA money compounds at ~5%. Since the checks are expensive, I write myself one check for the year’s medical expenses at the end of the year, and keep an itemized list (with receipts) of what the check is for with my tax papers in case of an audit. In the meantime, I’m pocketing interest. So far, no problems.

One thing to pay attention to, for tax purposes, is if your employer appears to be depositing the money or if you are. If you both take a tax deduction on it, that’s going to raise some red flags.

Go, squirrel, go!

This squirrel going through an obstacle course is awesome.

SCHADENFREUDE

Via monstersandcritics:

Another elected official was caught toe-tapping in the boys room. The Times-Picayune reports yet another Republican was caught soliciting in a public restroom.

Joey DiFatta is the chairman of St. Bernard Parish Council and a prominent Republican leader (until 2004 on the GOP state party Executive Committee).

He just withdrew from his state senate race, after his arrests for lewd behavior in a public restroom were made public.

Awwww.

School kids adopted a soldier in Iraq and sent him a stuffed bear. The soldier sent back lots of pics of what the bear has been up to.

More pictures here.

Source: fark.com

Earth-like planet may be forming

Via news.com.au:

SNUGGLED in a huge belt of warm dust, an Earth-like planet appears to be forming some 424 light years away, scientists say.

At between 10 and 16 million years old, the planet’s solar system was still in its “very young adolescence”, but was at the perfect age for forming Earth-like planets, said lead researcher Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

The huge dust ring surrounding one of the system’s two stars is smack in the middle of the system’s “habitable zone” where water could one day exist on a rocky planet.

These types of dust belts rarely form around sun-like stars and the presence of an outer ice belt makes it all the more likely that water, and subsequently life, could one day reach the planet’s surface.

And this belt is made up of rocky compounds similar to those which form our Earth’s crust and metal sulfides similar to the material found in the Earth’s core.
[...]
It would likely be about 100 million years before the planet was fully formed and – if our planet was anything to go by – about a billion years before the first signs of life such as algae appeared, Mr Lisse said.

You mean it’s not 6,000 years old? Sacrilege.