I went into a smidge more detail over on my Mastodon last night, but my response is summed up as “WTAF? No! Freeware is an explicit license, as anyone from the BBS days will recall.”
American here - our FEC takes a very dim view of satirical and otherwise non-existent candidates who file the paperwork to run, which makes me curious... If the Count were to win, who would actually take the seat? Have we any idea who is behind the (highly effective) satire, and would they be able to seamlessly serve?
Not without un-federalising. Given that generally, red states are net receivers of cash and blue states are net payors, that seems unlikely - TX rhetoric be damned.
Not that I’d begrudge Texas taking Abbot and Costello Paxton and kindly fucking right off, nor would I vote to spill one drop of American blood to keep them by force, of course
But I believe that die is long cast regardless.
After you spend down your allotted PTO, yes.
Mildly surprised that someone in a position at that level wouldn’t have at minimum short term disability coverage, at least as an option. It’s hardly expensive.
Yes I can. Deleted my last Google account yesterday. Got what I needed, and honestly once I liberated a couple phone numbers (too damn memorable to ever just give up), there wasn’t much left.
Been slowly migrating for awhile piece by piece, the timing just happened to work out well for the last piece, and the metaphoric peering in cabinets to make sure nothing got overlooked in the process.
I still have to deal with Win 11 for work, and having AI forced down my throat, but Google-free feels GOOD!
Central Illinois - basically everything within 50-75 miles of I-74 across the state. Doesn’t get bitter cold, not overrun with MAGA asshats (among the reasons we left another Midwest state), cost of living isn’t terrible, and easy access to Chicago, St Louis, and beyond.
Update: South Korea says it will send actual, meaningful numbers of troops into Pyongyang within thirty-one days, bringing a formal end to conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
/s but you know they’re thinking about it.
Just too easy to get over a barrel trying to DIY it, and the first time ya screw it up, you lose a ton of credibility with employees which also has a great deal of value.
Ironically, there are two newer formulations and the older soon to be authorised generic. My PBM in their infinite wisdom doesn’t want to cover the cheaper one. My doc has yet to get a PA approved for anyone for the newest version, so I’m stuck with the version they foisted upon us as soon as original exclusivity expired “because sodium raises BP,” and the newer one is salts with other metals.
Funny how they didn’t figure that out years ago……
Unfortunately not an option for specialty and niche drugs. Wish it was, I’d rather him get a cut than a certain PBM
I’m mildly curious to see what happens in the next month or two, as I’m about to hit my OOP max. Never ran into that combo of scenarios before.
The one I’m thinking of has a couple months “bridge” program for uninsured/just started new job/etc, but very time limited and an even bigger hassle as they’ll only send out two weeks instead of a month supply with each shipment.
IIRC, if I had insurance and it explicitly excluded the drug, the card would cover it, but it’s been a couple years since I left that job so memory isn’t clear.
None of is trustworthy. Mine is $$$$, and they know damn well insurance won’t pay it all. Of course, if the FDA didn’t require a single source pharmacy to ship it with all the infrastructure that entails, it would help, but only marginally.
Nightmare of a system even for relatively healthy folks. The older I get, the angrier I get because the people who most need the help are the ones either in enough pain they can’t nav the system, or old enough they don’t know where to start
Nobody is buying the med I have in mind out of pocket, in any world. Orphan drug, rare condition, and six figures a year.
Not to suggest your scenario doesn’t happen - it absolutely does. But I’m more curious about why I have to deal with a tiny company when they’re already eating a couple of grand a month on it.
It’s not a physical card always, it behaves like a secondary insurance payor, and if a $5k drug is covered for $2.5k by insurance, the card writes down the difference to $5 (as far as the patient is concerned).
Not unlike goodrx in principle, but specific to a drug.
As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.
“I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”
“Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”
“See above, and prioritise things that matter.”
I don’t disagree, just not sure why there’s always a cost associated with it. No one benefits from the $5 net I pay, and it’s just one more (costly) admin step.
If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.
No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.
Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.
YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.
Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.
Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.
I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.
I pay around 600 for myself and my wife, and that’s with my employer continuing to pick up a significant share of the cost of health insurance that I literally never see a deduction or bill for.
1,800 a year beats hell out of $7,200, a $5k deductible, 20% co ins, and $11k OOP max.
I’m forty-five minutes outside a medium sized pair of cities known for a decent state university, and glad to run into town for care as needed.
Landed in the hospital three months ago with something that got me a follow-up scheduled with neuro, in the practice associated with the hospital.
Three months to the day later, I’ve only just had the suggested test and the visit is still a month out…. With an NP. Not the MD who saw me in the hospital.
Honestly, at this point, I’m only keeping after that issue because I need their clearance to get surgery for my actual, pressing, immediate, and painful concern.
Visible is wholly owned by VZW, and runs a whole $30/mo inclusive of tax and such.
Best compromise I’ve found between network and not getting screwed or being surprised with outages.
This is very, very niche, but I couldn’t think of a more suitable place so I’ll give it a go.
In the US, brand name medications are outrageously priced. There are deals between payors (PBM/Medicare) and manufacturers that look like this:
Sticker price $20,000/mo minus negotiated insurance payment of $15,000 theoretically leaves pt on the hook for $5.000/mo, BUT…
Manufacturer graciously offers a “coupon” / discount card, which covers a max of $4,995.00, leaving pt with a net responsibility of $5.00/month.
These are convenient numbers to work with, but closely resemble the pricing and coverage structure of a long-term medication I take.
The coupon never results in zero pt responsibility, always leaving some negligible amount due. Invariably, it’s exactly enough money to be a huge pain in everyone’s ass and to make no meaningful difference to anyone involved in the transaction. $5.00 and $9.00 are amounts I see frequently.
Getting to the actual question, why bother?
Seriously, I wasted a half hour of my life waiting on hold to schedule a refill on a specialty med that can only be filled from a single central pharmacy and shipped, to be told that a) they somehow didn’t charge card on file for the $5.00 last month, and b) can’t schedule next shipment until I pay the all-important five bucks. Didn’t have a card close at hand, had to call back later so they could extract their couple dollars and then schedule the next round.
It literally costs them more in toll free charges, infrastructure fixed costs, and salaries to collect that money than they make from it.
I assume the answer is something along the lines of “personal responsibility” and someone in Congress having a stroke over the idea of someone getting medicine for “free,” but I’ve been unable to substantiate that.
Convinced there is a reason, probably buried in a 10,000 page CMS policy manual, because the mfg coupon literally never brings the price to zero. See, e.g., DTC drug commercials referencing “pay as little as $x a month!”