#Prospective Payment Systems

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The health industry’s invisible hand is a fist

On June 21, I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On June 22, I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

The US has the rich world's most expensive health care system, and that system delivers the worst health outcomes of any country in the rich world. Also, the US is unique in relying on market forces as the primary regulator of its health care system. All of these facts are related!

Capitalism's most dogmatic zealots have a mystical belief in the power of markets to "efficiently allocate" goods and services. For them, the process by which goods and services are offered and purchased performs a kind of vast, distributed computation that "discovers the price" of everything. Our decisions to accept or refuse prices are the data that feeds this distributed computer, and the signals these decisions send about our desires triggers investment decisions by sellers, which guides the whole system to "equilibrium" in which we are all better off.

There's some truth to this: when demand for something exceeds the supply, prices tend to go up. These higher prices tempt new sellers into the market, until demand is met and prices fall and production is stabilized at the level that meets demand.

But this elegant, self-regulating system rarely survives contact with reality. It's the kind of simplified model that works when we're hypothesizing about perfectly spherical cows of uniform density on a frictionless surface, but ceases to be useful when it encounters a messy world of imperfect rationality, imperfect information, monopolization, regulatory capture, and other unavoidable properties of reality.

For members of the "efficient market" cult, reality's stubborn refusal to behave the way it does in their thought experiments is a personal affront. Panged by cognitive dissonance, the cult members insist that any market failures in the real world are illusions caused by not doing capitalism hard enough. When deregulation and markets fail, the answer is always more deregulation and more markets.

That's the story of the American health industry in a nutshell. Rather than accepting that people won't shop for the best emergency room while unconscious in an ambulance, or that the "clearing price" of "not dying of cancer" is "infinity," the cult insists that America's worst-in-class, most expensive health system just needs more capitalism to turn it into a world leader.

In the 1980s, Reagan's court sorcerers decreed that they could fix health care with something called "Prospective Payment Systems," which would pay hospitals a lump sum for treating conditions, rather than reimbursing them for each procedure, using competition and profit motives to drive "efficiency." The hospital system responded by "upcoding' patients: if you showed up with a broken leg and a history of coronary disease, they would code you as a heart patient and someone who needed a cast. They'd collect both lump sums, slap a cast on you, and wheel you out the door:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195137/

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this kind of abuse was predictable from the outset, especially since Health and Human Services is starved of budget for auditors and can only hand out "slaps on the wrist" when they catch a hospital ripping off the system:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-13-fantasyland-general/

Upcoding isn't limited to Medicare fraud, either. Hospitals and insurers are locked in a death-battle over payments, and hospitals' favorite scam is sending everyone to the ER, even when they don't have emergencies (some hospitals literally lock all the doors except for the ER entrance). That way, a normal, uncomplicated childbirth can be transformed into a "Level 5" emergency treatment (the highest severity of emergency) and generate a surprise bill of over $2,700:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

The US health industry is bad enough to generate a constant degree of political will for change, but the industry (and its captured politicians and regulators) is also canny enough to dream up an endless procession of useless gimmicks designed to temporarily bleed off the pressure for change. In 2018, HHS passed a rule requiring hospitals to publish their prices.

Hospitals responded to this with a shrewd gambit: they simply ignored the rule. So in 2021, HHS made another rule, creating penalties for ignoring the first rule:

https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-price-transparency/hospitals

The theory here was that publishing prices would create "market discipline." Again, this isn't wholly nonsensical. To the extent that patients have nonurgent conditions and the free time to shop around, being able to access prices will help them. Indeed, if the prices are in a standards-defined, machine-readable form, patients and their advocates could automatically import them, create price-comparison sites, leaderboards, etc. None of this addresses the core problem that health-care is a) a human right and b) not a discretionary expense, but it could help at the margins.

But there's another wrinkle here. The same people who claim that prices can solve all of our problems also insist that monopolies are impossible. They've presided over a decades-long assault on antitrust law that has seen hospitals, pharma companies, insurers, and a menagerie of obscure middlemen merge into gigantic companies that are too big to fail and too big to jail. When a single hospital system is responsible for the majority of care in a city or even a county, how much punishment can regulators realistically subject it to?

Not much, as it turns out. Kuttner describes how Mass Gen Brigham cornered the market on health-care in Boston, allowing it to flout the rules on pricing. In addition to standard tricks – like charging self-pay patients vastly more than insured payments (because individuals don't have the bargaining power of insurers), Mass Gen Brigham's price data is a sick joke.

See for yourself! The portal will send you giant, unstructured, ZIPped text files filled with cryptic garbage like:

ADJUSTABLE C TAPER NECK PLUS|1|UNITED HEALTHCARE [1016]|HB CH UNITED HMO / PPO / INDEMNITY [34]|UNITED HEALTHCARE HMO [101604]|75|Inv Loc: 1004203; from OR location 1004203|52.02|Inpatient PAF; 69.36% Billed|75|Inv Loc: 1004203; from OR location 1004203|56.87|Outpatient PAF; 75.83% Billed

https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/patient-care/patient-visitor-information/billing/cms-required-hospital-charge-data

These files have tens of thousands of rows. As a patient, you are meant to parse through these in order to decide whether you're getting ripped off on that HIP STEM 16X203MM SIZE 4 FEMORAL PRESS FIT NEUTRAL REVISION TITANIUM you're in the market for (as it happens, I have two of these in my body).

Kuttner describes the surreal lengths he had to go through to prevent his mother from getting ripped off by Mass Gen through an upcoding hustle. By coding her as "admitted for observation," Mass Gen was able to turn her into an outpatient, with a 20% co-pay (this is down to a GW Bush policy that punishes hospitals that charge Medicare for inpatient care when they could be treated as outpatients – hospitals reflexively game the system to make every patient an outpatient, even if they have overnight hospital stays).

Kuttner's an expert on this: he was national policy correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine and covers the health beat for the Prospect. Even so, it took him ten hours of phone calls to two doctors' offices and Blue Cross to resolve the discrepancy. The average person is not qualified to do this – indeed, the average person won't even know they've been upcoded.

Needless to say that people in other countries – countries where health care is cheaper and the outcomes are better – are baffled by this. Canadians, Britons, Australians, Germans, Finns, etc do not have to price-shop for their care. They don't have to hawkishly monitor their admission paperwork for sneaky upcodes. They don't have to spend ten hours on the phone arguing about esoteric billing practices.

In a rational world, we'd compare the American system to the rest of the world and say, "Well, they've figured it out, we should do what they're doing." But in good old U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!, the answer to this is more prices, more commercialization, more market forces. Just rub some capitalism on it!

That's where companies like Multiplan come in: this is a middleman that serves other middlemen. Multiplan negotiates prices on behalf of insurers, and splits the difference between the list price and the negotiated price with them:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/us/health-insurance-medical-bills.html

But – as the Arm and a Leg podcast points out – this provides the perverse incentive for Multiplan to drive list prices up. If the list price quintuples, and then Multiplan drives it back down to, say, double the old price, they collect more money. Meanwhile, your insurer sticks you with the bill, over and above your deductible and co-pay:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/multiplan/

The Multiplan layer doesn't just allow insurers to rip you off (though boy does it allow insurers to rip you off), it also makes it literally impossible to know what the price is going to be before you get your procedure. As with any proposition bet, the added complexity is there to make it impossible for you to calculate the odds and figure out if you're getting robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/04/house-always-wins/#are-you-on-drugs

Multiplan is the purest expression of market dynamics brainworms I've yet encountered: solving the inefficiencies created by the complexity of a system with too many middlemen by adding another middle-man who is even more complex.

No matter what the problem is with America's health industry, the answer is always the same: more markets! Are older voters getting pissed off at politicians for slashing Medicare? No problem: just create Medicare Advantage, where old people can surrender their right to government care and place themselves in the loving hands of a giant corporation that makes more money by denying them care.

The US health industry is a perfect parable about the dangers of trusting shareholder accountable markets to do the work of democratically accountable governments. Shareholders love monopolies, so they drove monopolization throughout the health supply chain. As David Dayen writes in his 2020 book Monopolized the pharma industry monopolized first, and put the screws to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Hospitals formed regional monopolies to counter the seller power of consolidated Big Pharma. That's Mass Gen's story: tapping the capital markets to buy other hospitals in the region until it became too big to fail and too big to jail (and too big to care). Consolidated hospitals, in turn, put the screws to insurers, so they also consolidated, fighting Big Hospital's pricing power.

Monopoly at any point in a supply chain leads to monopoly throughout the supply chain. But patients can't consolidate (that's what governments are for – representing the diffuse interests of people). Neither can health workers (that's what unions are for). So the system screwed everyone: patients paid more for worse care. Health workers put in longer hours under worse conditions and got paid less.

Kuttner describes how his eye doctor races from patient to patient "as if he was on roller skates." When Kuttner wrote him a letter questioning the quality of care, the eye doctor answered that he understood that he was giving his patients short shrift, but explained that he had to, because his pay was half what he needed, relegating him to a small apartment and an old car. The hospital – which skims the payments he gets for care – sets his caseload, and he can't turn down patients.

The answers to this are obvious: get markets out of health care. Unionize health workers. Give regulators the budgets and power to hold health corporations to account.

But for market cultists, all of that can't work. Instead, we have to create more esoteric middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" and Multiplan. We need more prices to shovel into the market computer's data-hopper. If we just capitalism hard enough, surely the system will finally work…someday.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

[darkmaga-returns]

Former President Donald Trump has unveiled a bold plan to eliminate the federal income tax, signaling a dramatic shift in U.S. fiscal policy as part of his 2025 economic agenda.

The plan follows a string of other tax cuts put forward by Trump, including the removal of taxes on car-loan payments, social security benefits and servers’ tips. But a potential elimination of personal income taxes for all Americans goes much further.

The prospect of abolishing the federal income tax carries a sense of bold possibility. It envisions a simpler system, freeing millions from the complexities of annual filings and reshaping how the nation generates revenue.

When podcast host Joe Rogan asked Trump last month whether he was serious about the plan, Trump said, “Yeah, sure, why not?”

[kirynnvt]

You, tumblr user, have you heard of the commission website VGen?

i am not being paid this is not an official ad i just really think its super cool and more people should check it out maybe and help them build a better online commission ecosystem

It's like fiverrr but with no AI and much less of a risk of getting scammed. They take reports very seriously and all verified artists have been reviewed by a human in their dev team.

You can commission fully custom (or YCH) pieces of art in all different mediums. From music, to writing, and even physical goods! There's also a shop feature coming soon for pre-made items or adoptables! There's also a ton of filters to help you find exactly what you want AND you can always follow an artist to get notified of when they open next.

Every seller gets their own page to customize which hosts not only the services they're selling, but also space for a portfolio, and reviews for past commissions.

Artists even get to review their past clients so that other artists can look out for troublesome buyers :3c

For anyone interested in selling there, it is still in open beta so you'll need an invite code to start selling. More information here: https://vgen.co/for-artists

The biggest plus for artists IMO is the discoverability and notification system. Anyone who follows you can choose to be notified by email whenever you open comms. They also have an entire dashboard where you can keep track of all your comms, services, and even your TOSs (policies).

Like any selling platform, they do have fees though :'( It's a 5% fee on every order you make through them and they have a price breakdown for every sale that tells you how much you'll actually be getting after VGen fees + payment processing (Paypal or Stripe) fees.

They provide a ton of services for us artists and while the fees can hurt, I don't mind them too much. I personally use my VGen as just ONE form of selling, I also make sales through other websites or on my own through word of mouth or through my social medias. There's no expectation that VGen will be your ONLY platform that you sell on :)

I really really love the mission that VGen has of helping human artists thrive and making commission based selling easier and more accessible to prospective clients. They're constantly improving the site and they actively review suggestions through their discord. If you'd like to help them succeed make buy something from an artist on there \o/

oh also bonus, they currently allow spicy artwork as well

[angel-of-the-moons]

Local Flavor

Poe Dameron x Fem Twi'lek!Reader

Summary:

On a solo job to Ryloth to pickup a shipment for The Resistance, Poe runs into an unexpected hiccup. With his only transport damaged and BB-8 offline, Poe is forced to stash his cargo and venture out into the harsh Rylothian landscape, where he finds you. Or, more accurately... you find him.

TW/CW: Near death, infection, fever, dehydration, fluff, Poe is a disaster pansexual idiot, BB-8 is his son fight me. Bugs!!! Big!!! Bugs!!! Strip poker (technically), everybody checks everyone out, but nothing explicit happens.

A/N: It's about time I wrote something for Poe! I can finally do the idea I had now that I thought up a plot! This fic takes place before The Force Awakens! (I hope you guys like the reference I put in there! Dun dun duuuun!)

And like, I just wanted an excuse to show Leia being the "team mom".

Asdfghjkl god this is a long-winded one but I didn't wanna break it up into parts; and the ending feels a bit lacking, but i loved writing it.

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It was supposed to be a routine supply run for some extra credits for the Resistance.

Go to the location, pick up the package from the dead drop, bring it to his ship, and go deliver it to his contact for payment, then come on home.

What he didn't anticipate? Was the pack of gutkurr that ambushed he and BB-8, his droid companion after they spent almost a full day digging up the concealed cache.

The large carnivorous insects ambushed them on the way out of a rocky canyon bend, jumping from the well-camouflaged crevices they concealed themselves in and onto the speeder he'd paid next to nothing for.

It was a junker, for sure, but the fuel cells and thrusters were good enough to do the trip he needed it for. He wouldn't be able to fit his ship into these narrow twists and turns even if he tried.

Maybe if he had his X-Wing, but that would have been too high-profile for this run, which is why he had to settle for a simple, tiny cargo freighter.

But while on the ground he needed something more maneuverable. Hence that kriffing speeder.

As soon as one of the gutkurr landed on the hood, the thin metal folded in, the inner workings of the speeder sputtering and erupting into smoke as the sickle-like claws of the creature dug into the metal for better security as it snapped its jaws in Poe's direction.

He had to bob and tip away and try to see around the animal, while BB-8 shocked it if it got too close to Poe. Always his best sidekick, that droid was his partner in crime.

But try as the little droid might, he just was no match when the speedier just died, unable to take the strain anymore as the electrical system short-circuited and send sparks of light arcing every which way, sending the droid's head spinning with a high pitched "beep-wheeeeep!" before completely stilling.

The nose of the speeder was forced down, digging a gouge of dry craggy soil until it pitched forward because of the sheer weight in the front from Poe, the gutkurr, and the cases of cargo strapped to the sides.

Poe was sent flying through the air, just narrowly dodging the snapping maw of the gutkurr as it rolled back to its feet, a piece of jagged metal jabbing into its flesh where the natural armor plating had gapped.

Poe spun around, both blasters drawn as the rest of the pack caught up, salivating at the prospect of a fresh meal.

A big, handsome, juicy one, if Poe actually had to brag about it.

He'd tried to fire at them, but his blaster bolts simply bounced right off their thick carapaces.

Kriff.

He fired again, and once more the red bolts fizzed off the shells and into the canyon walls, sending shards of chalky rock and dust raining down on them.

"Kriff!"

There were three of them.

Three of them versus one of him. It may have been a bit more even had BB-8 not been fried by the overload to his system, but right now it was down to just what little he had on him to fight. And it wasn't much. He had a few grenades... but were they enough to get through their carapaces when his blaster couldn't?

The creatures all hissed as they slowly advanced on him, snapping their maws and growling deeply to intimidate him into turning and running away, just so they could strike at him from behind.

Poe was reckless, but not stupid.

Okay, well maybe there was that one time on Corellia, but--

He sucked his bottom lip between his teeth as he slowly put one foot in after the other, backing away as carefully as possible with no sudden movements.

"Okay, buglies... Easy, there..." Poe said gently to them, his dark eyes darting around frantically for an out.

Firing his blasters was pointless, it bounced right off the ugly shells--

Wait.

His eyes quickly raked up the sides of the craggy rocks towering on either side of them. Maybe...

Ah... screw it.

Poe backed further from the speeder, leading the nasties away from his downed speeder and best pal.

If he timed it right... Then maybe he could pull this trick off.

"Come on, that's it... come get a nice juicy bite of some Dameron steak..." He continued to talk to himself as his hand slowly lowered his other blaster, letting it hang loosely from the worn leather strap. His fingers deftly found their way to the round objects in one of the pockets of his belt and he pulled one out, his thumb flicking the arming switch.

His feet moved beneath him in a blur.

In a second he was able to toss a grenade at the feet of one of the gutkurr, the creatures snarling and hissing at the object before it detonated, sending shards up through the softer shell of the underbelly through one of them, killing the creature with a thunderous boom and crack as the carapace gave way beneath the force of the explosion.

Poe had thrown himself backwards as the explosion tossed one of the remaining two insectoids against the canyon wall, disorienting it as the other lunged for Poe, snatching his leg between his jaws and crunching down.

Either the gutkurr didn't intend to rip his leg off or it was knocked off its senses by the blast, he didn't know. The searing pain as the animal's fangs shredded through his leather boot and ripped into his skin, sending hot gushes of bright red blood out onto the yellowish sand below.

Poe cried out, gritting his teeth and blinking back tears as he raised his blaster again, this time pressing the barrel straight against the eye of the beast; the white-hot bolt burning right through to the brain, killing it with a double-tap of the trigger.

Once it slumped to the side, Poe scrambled away once more, grabbing another grenade from his pouch and tossing it to the last surviving gutkurr.

He rolled into his side and covered his head as it detonated, sending chunks of rock crumbling from the canyon walls, falling and crushing the gutkurr beneath the weight of the stones.

Once the dust cleared, Poe laid back in the sand and heaved heavy breaths, sweat soaking his clothes as the adrenaline coursed through his body.

He managed to force himself to his feet and hobble back to his crashed speeder. His first action was to pull BB-8 free from the socket and proceed to check him over.

Upon seeing the scorch marks, Poe's brows pinched up and his heart fluttered.

"Oh, buddy..." He breathed as he leaned in, pressing his forehead to what would be the spherical droid's face.

"Don't worry," He promised. "I'll get us out of here. And then... we're getting the hell off of Ryloth."

Poe carefully set his droid pal to the side and began scrambling for his medical kit.

When he found the busted metal tin, he cringed when he saw the contents. One singular bacta patch and a bunch of bandages.

Seriously? What had he been thinking! The General told him he needed to keep a fully stocked kit on him, but did he listen? Noooooo.

"C'mon, General. It's me." Poe grinned at her. "How often do I get shot?"

She pursed her slightly wrinkled lips and crossed her arms, her brow quirking upwards skeptically, her bright beautiful brown eyes locking with his own.

"Do you want me to count on both hands or use my toes, too? Because I'd still run out if I tried to count."

Damn, the woman had been right. Again. He had half a mind to wonder if she didn't see a vision of him getting shot before this run, and reminded him solely because of that.

He read in a holo once that Jedi could use the Force to heal wounds, and he was currently fresh out of Jedi.

The throb in his leg sent fresh tears surging up to dew on the edges of his eyelashes as he dropped down.

Taking a piece of the cargo mounting that had broken off during the crash, Poe used his knife in his other boot to slice the remainders of his pants leg away and carefully toe'd the boot off his foot so he could better assess the damage.

And yeah, it was bad. He needed a medical droid or some kinda doctor, fast. With how bad the lacerations to the flesh and muscle, infection would be a death sentence. From a simple glance, even he could tell his tibial and fibular arteries weren't damaged (thank the Force) because of the gaps that were between the gutkurr's fangs.

But the force of the bite alone at least fractured his tibia, maybe even broke his ankle.

Kriff.

Poe ripped the foil packet containing the pitifully tiny bacta patch and pressed it down over the biggest hole in his leg.

Hell, if it couldn't fix it all, it was better it fix some than none.

He winced as the cold gel touched the open wound, and rifling through the kit once more provided him with some much-needed sterile gauze. No antibacterial gel however, so the risk of infection was still there. Especially from the saliva of that nasty critter alone.

"Beggars can't be choosers, Poe..." He grunted to himself as he broke another loose piece of metal from the cargo mounting and lined them both up, struggling to wrap them as tight as possible on either side of his leg so he could make a field splint.

He gripped the sides of his speeder and groaned as he felt his adrenaline wane as he looked at the wreckage.

Well... now he had another problem.

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By another graced miracle, Poe was able to create a sled that he was able to drop the crates of cargo onto, as well as his precious droid friend.

After he stashed and concealed the cargo in a small cave, Poe took stock of what little provisions he had, which consisted of some pre-packaged meals and two or three water capsules.

Barely enough to survive long; but, he remembered the way out of the canyon. There was a forest or a jungle on the fringes of the desert, not far from where he'd come in... Maybe he'd have a better chance of surviving. Maybe...

Poe talked to BB-8 as he dragged the offline droid behind him on the sled, murmuring stupid jokes and ideas about the shenanigans they'd get up to once they were home free. And about the ear-bending lectures the General would give him.

He realized though, after two days, that he was hopelessly, terribly lost. His water was running low, his food rations were okay because of the portions he limited himself to, but once the fever set in, the logical side of Poe's brain told him he was going to die an inglorious death in the middle of nowhere, thanks to a bum leg and a bacta patch that did a piss poor job.

Poe kept going until he lost track of time, walking on and on until he collapsed, face first into his own tracks, shortly lamenting his own life choices as he drifted from the conscious world.

Man, did the universe have a twisted sense of kriffing humor.

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It was a simple day for you. You were on your way back from picking clean a crashed Republic-Era ship for parts to bring back home to improve some of your farming equipment. Maybe you could catch some spare credits to stash in your emergency pouch beneath the floorboards in your bedroom.

Your blurrg, Kari, crooned deeply as she pawed at the rocky sand with her stumpy legs. You sighed, adjusting your sun visor back down to shield your eyes from the harsh light of your homeworld's star. It was an unusually clear day for this time of year, and the sun was especially unforgiving. You couldn't wait to get into the safety of the treeline and back to your meager little farm in the forest.

"C'mon, Kari. The sooner we can get home, the sooner I can get this cart off you." You say, leaning down to pat her, one of your lekku falling over your shoulder to dangle down, the tip curling slightly.

Sometimes you envied how humans could cut their hair, but if you cut your lekku, you were as good as handicapped, with how sensitive yours were to touch. Yeah, your head-tails were longer than average, and irritating, but hey, they were yours.

The sun gleamed off your sweat-soaked skin beneath your fatigues as you nudged Kari with your heel in the stirrup to get her to continue moving.

But once again, the stubborn she-beast refused to move, rumbling deeply in protest as she shook her stubby little head.

You grit your teeth and squint against the harsh sun, and that's when you see it. Your other animal companion, a can-cell, Cviki, circling overhead, his iridescent wings fluttering against the updrafts, the sun glimmering off his bright blue-green carapace as he made another aerial pass.

You frowned. There should be nothing in that canyon except the roving pack of scavenging gutkurr you have long known to avoid. Growing up in Ryloth, you knew Twi'leks were tasty snacks for the large insectoids. So why was Cviki circling like something interesting was there? There couldn't possibly be people, even the smartest smugglers knew it was dangerous in those canyons, all the locals avoided them with good reason.

You click your tongue and jerk the reins, "Alright, ma sareen. We'll go see what has you both so interested."

You bring your fingers to your lips and make a high-pitched whistle. The tune Cviki understood as "I'm coming, be careful" since you'd raised him from a larvae.

Maybe whatever was in the canyon was worth some credits in salvage?

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You carefully marked your path into the narrow canyon as Cviki led you from above, knowing full well not marking your trail was a death wish to the unprepared.

But you were anything but unprepared.

Your lekku flopping in the breeze as Kari galloped through and in-between the canyon walls, you make an audible gasp as you yank the reins on Kari's harness, squeezing your feet instinctively in a command to stop.

A crashed speeder of some sort (honestly it probably looked better in the ground than when it was running) and the rotting corpses of three gutkurr lay in the craggy soil, smaller scavengers already hard at work picking the remains clean.

Living gutkurr smelled bad enough, but their dessicated corpses were horrible.

You dismounted Kari, patting her flank as you walked by, pulling your long blaster rifle from its sling low on your hips as you carefully walked around the wreckage, poking the twisted metal with the barrel of your rifle just in case.

Upon further inspection, you see nothing of value. Not even the droid that was surely busted judging from the scorch marks in the docking port.

Damn shame. A droid was just the thing you were missing to help out on your farm. Parts from whatever droid had been docked there really would have helped finish up the one you had in pieces back in your workshop.

Oh, well...

You kept looking around, noting that there was not only no sign of a droid, but no sign of the pilot of the speeder. You shoulder your rifle again and kneel down, touching the soul with your fingertips as you study the boot prints that had almost been fully covered by the drifting sands.

"Ah, hells." You mutter as you stand. Some poor fool had been sent on a fool's errand by some smuggler.

You turn, pushing your other lekku back over your shoulder as you whistle for Kari to approach. Cviki had stopped his flying to stick to one of the rocky walls, chittering down at you curiously.

You snap your fingers as you mount your blurrg once again, and whistle sharply at Cviki.

"Wachamio!" You shout up at him in Ryl, pointing down the canyon. "Let's go see if that poor sod is still breathing!"

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Yeah, he was breathing all right. Breathing and feverish. Hell, when you caught up to Cviki you had to swat at his beak when he picked up the human man's uninjured leg in his mouth and tugged, playfully trying to see if he would play.

Yeah... he was the guy who fought those gutkurr, all right. He got damned lucky.

"Oh, kriff." You sighed, kneeling next to him as he weakly swatted at you, his eyes dry and crusted closed. You could tell by the sweat and mucus that he was battling an infection, most likely from the deep injury to his leg. He probably got bit by that gutkurr; everyone knew to immediately disinfect any bites--if you survived an encounter with a gutkurr that is--because of the bacteria that lived in gutkurr saliva. It was a death sentence to anyone without proper medical supplies.

And when you'd looked inside of the medical kit at the wreckage, you could see he had none.

'Equal parts desperate and lucky.' You think to yourself as you effortlessly (and gently) wipe the crust from his eyes.

"Nu nala quin-nala wilo?" You ask him.

"Whuh--?" He rasped, his lips cracked and split from dehydration.

You roll your eyes with slight exasperation. The man was delirious, of course he wouldn't be able to understand you right now. And, for all you knew, he couldn't even speak Ryl.

"I'm going. To help. Youuuuu." You emphasize slowly and loudly in Basic as his head rolls around and he mumbles incoherently.

"Ugh, you better be worth it." You grunt, whistling for Kari to come closer so the cart was next to you.

Kriff, that man was all dead weight, you felt your muscles strain as you dragged him onto the cart that was still hooked to Kari. You had to shove your meager salvage off to the side to make room for him and his little BB-model astromech.

At least it wasn't a total bust, if this guy died, maybe you could get his droid back up and running to work for you. But those were thoughts for later.

Right now you had some dumb human to lug back home and try to save.

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Ugh... The only thing Poe knew was that he hurt. He hurt worse than that time he was tackled by that besalisk in that one cantina...

A drunken dare, mind you, but he still got flattened by the man's weight alone. There was still probably a dent in that cantina wall to this very day.

His head pounded, but he managed to drag his eyes open and force himself up with his palms.

His muscles ached and his skin hurt. He was shirtless and dressed down all the way to his undergarments.

Poe dropped back onto the bed he was resting on. It was comfortable, very much so; much more than the bunks on the ships and in the barracks he'd been hopping to and from the past few years.

So someone had saved his stupid kriffing ass, but he couldn't remember anything concrete.

He dropped his hand onto his forehead, the skin on his body peeling and flaking away as the sunburn healed; thinking back hard.

The last thing he remembered was his vision clearing somewhat, and then a bright light.

Wait...

He remembered a voice. A woman's voice, talking in a language he wasn't sure he was familiar with.

"Man... must've been an angel..." He chuckled sardonically, his voice cracked and throat dry.

Poe winced and looked to the bedside, seeing a glass of water next to him on the small table. Instinctively, he grabbed it and chugged it faster than a pint of cheap weequay beer.

By the Force, it felt amazing to finally have something wet his parched throat.

He turned his head when he heard whirring and a rolling sound approach the room, and a grin broke out on his face as the curtain was pushed open and a certain round little astromech rolled into the room with him.

"Aw, I knew I'd recognize the sound of those servos anywhere! BB! C'mere, you little--" He grunted, rolling off the bed and biting hit bottom lip as his injured leg hit the wooden floor.

BB-8 made several high pitched beeps and whirs in a chastising manner.

"I know, I know, but c'mere, you little cannonball!" Poe laughed through the pain, wrapping his thick arms around the round little droid as he trilled happily at his companion's better spirits.

BB-8 chirped and beeped again.

"Oh, my leg? It hurts like hell, where are we?" Poe asked, looking around. This was clearly somebody's bedroom, in some kind of small, prefab house that had been patched many times over. Probably purchased at a scrap yard. Hah. Like that kriffing speeder he wasted his credits on.

BB-8 whirred as he rolled about the room, making various noises as he explained to his human friend the situation.

"An infection?" His thick brows shot up. "Damn. Please tell me I looked beautiful when I went down?"

BB-8 stopped dead in his tracks, and the only part of him that moved was his head, and he made a few beeps.

"Okay yeah I knew you were out, it was rhetorical. Who do you think dragged you through that canyon?" Poe sighed, shaking his head, his sweaty curls dangling.

BB-8 tweeted in reply.

"A woman? Wait, so I wasn't hallucinating that part?" Poe blinked at the tiny droid as he wheeled his way up to him once more, bumping into him a few times affectionately.

"Okay, yeah, I get it. I owe the lady. Definitely owe her if she fixed you up, little buddy." Poe smiled warmly, patting the droid's chassis sweetly.

He was so caught up in the reunion with his partner that he almost jumped out of his skin when heavy bootsteps halted in the doorway and the curtain was pulled back, revealing... you.

Hot, gorgeous, sweaty and badass you. You were covered in grime and dirt from working the field you had and fixing your tiller that had crapped out on you. Hot damn, you were probably the hottest Twi'lek he'd ever seen, even your head-tails looked absolutely luscious.

You had initially sent BB-8 inside to fetch a tool, and when he hadn't returned you came inside to see why.

You tugged off your rawhide gloves and leaned in the doorway, smirking at the human as you shoved your gloves into the waistband of your pulled-down coveralls.

'C'mon Poe, put on the charm...' He chastised himself.

He cleared his throat and gave you his best debonair smile along with his signature quirked brow and squinted eyes; the smile that had won him the companionship from many women (and guys and others in-between) throughout the galaxy.

But he couldn't fathom the fact that he looked positively pathetic with a kriffed up leg, lying half-naked on your bedroom floor.

That is... until you broke out laughing, and BB-8 spun in a circle, joining in on your revelry at his attempt at flirtation.

Poe sighed deeply, dropping his cocky expression. "Eh, so... Uh... you're the lady who I remember from the canyon, right?"

You nod, your lekku quivering from within the soft leather quiver you'd bound them in, "Yana."

Poe blinked up at you. You did speak Basic just then, right? His hearing just messed up for a second? Right...

"So, on behalf of... well, me and my little friend here, thank you for saving us!" He grins awkwardly. "What's your name, miss..?"

You smirk again and utter something, your name, perhaps? And then ask, "Zul nala z'rate nala quora?"

BB-8 speaks to you for Poe when he doesn't answer, merely giving you a concerned look as he began to fear he was stuck with a woman who didn't speak Basic. He really needs to brush up on his xeno-linguistics...

You click your tongue and shake your head, "Su'un na, mesh'e yahte." You roll your eyes and tip your head to the side and tell him your name, this time clearly.

"Oh, man, am I happy you can understand me." Poe grinned. "Uh... Can you... help me off the floor? Please?"

"Yahte." You sigh deeply, walking over to him.

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The man you'd saved was someone called "Poe Dameron" a supposed "master pilot" for some "resistance". When Poe mentioned your skills as a medic and your ability to patch droids, he even hurled the suggestion to you that you join up.

You refused.

"What? Why?" Poe asked incredulously, setting his fork down on your tiny table as you both picked at your humble meal.

"Because I saw enough fighting when the Empire remnants sacked my hometown when I was a small child. They did it out of sheer spite for General Syndulla's role in the destruction of the last Death Star. I lost both of my parents, I lost my grandmother. If it wasn't for Numa saving me from the rubble I would have had nothing." You say, your lekku trembling at the memory of your home being blasted to smithereens.

Poe wilted. The two of you were close in age, the two of you were young enough and old enough to remember the Death Star, the war, the people you loved...

And, yeah, he understood your reasoning. Why get swallowed up by the war that devoured your family in front of you, when you can be a hermit, farming healing herbs and delivering produce and salted meats to one of the smaller towns further north?

"Okay... I'm sorry." Poe said, his eyes downcast as his own sour memories played back in his mind.

"No, no..." You sigh, pinching the bridge of your nose. "I shouldn't have blown up on you like that. Kriff, I swear, living in the woods shortens my temper."

Poe smiled at you and stretched out his leg beneath the table, the brace you'd rigged up for him squeaking as he bent his knee.

"How's the leg?" You pipe in.

"Oh, it's definitely better. Whatever kinda magic plants you got, they're certainly doing the trick!" Poe grinned at you.

"It's not magic. It's just natural medicine." You waved your fork at him. "And don't forget, you owe me for using half my stash of bacta to help fix your leg. You still got a few weeks to pay off that debt to me, Mor'ski."

Poe held up his hands innocently, grinning sideways at you. "Heyyy... I'm a man of my word! And the deadline on that shipment is... Well it technically doesn't have one."

"Did you ever think that it didn't have one because your contact knew sending people into those canyons was a death sentence? Because they knew odds of one person surviving in that canyon were like, maybe 2 to 20?" You snort. "Sounds to me that the people who hired you have been feeding people to the gutkurrs until somebody could finally nab that cache."

Poe blinked and you could easily tell that the thought had never crossed his mind.

Yahte.

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"Careful, Mor'ski." You snort, leaning on the fence as Kari bucks Poe off her saddle once again; before shuffling on to drink from her trough. BB-8 makes loud beeping and trilling as he spins in a circle, enjoying some humor at Poe's expense.

"Ugh!" Poe groaned.

Kari huffed and made a short bellow, trotting back around to nudge Poe with her flat snout.

Poe pats her as he sits up, "Okay, you like me but not enough for me to ride you? I mean I knew my charm worked on the ladies, but c'mon, I can't even stay on you for five seconds!"

"That's because I've raised her almost directly from birth, Poe." You grin victoriously before clicking your teeth, uttering a few words in Ryl before Kari abandons Poe altogether to rush up to you for affection.

"That's it, ma sareen." You coo at her.

"Uhh!" Poe scoffs as he stands up, dusting off the old worn pants you'd loaned him, his leg brace creaking as he walked over to you.

The damage Poe had sustained to his leg from the gutkurr was bad. Bad enough that even your small stash of bacta patches (some of which were probably past their best by date...) couldn't heal all the damage or regenerate properly. Or perhaps it was from the bacteria eating away at his flesh when you found him. You weren't sure, but the man would walk with a slight gait for the rest of his life.

But of course, knowing Poe, he would use it to his advantage just to cock his hips out to get some attention.

You were almost gonna miss that idiot when he was well enough to leave, and his cute little droid, too. It was nice to have company after so long alone.

"Well what about him?" Poe asked, pointing to Cviki, who had just plucked a fruit from a nearby tree and ate it messily. "I bet I could ride him!"

You laugh and smack your thigh, "Oh, be my guest! But remember, Mor'ski: Cviki is a can-cell. Not a fighter. If he decides he doesn't want you in the pilot seat anymore..."

Poe swallowed a bit nervously.

Maybe he should stick with the blurrg.

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Three weeks had gone by, and you knew Poe leaving was inevitable. He had finally done away with the leg brace and you inspected his healing leg. It was coming along nicely. It would scar, for sure, but he'd be able to walk.

And you were right, before. He did walk with a gait, one he carried with confidence in combination with that aggravatingly handsome smirk of his.

Could this man find a dark side in anything? Other than the First Order? You doubted it, he seemed good at turning bad situations around.

And oh, you would miss listening to Poe dote on that cute little astromech, BB-8. He was like a father doting on his infant child. You even caught him scooping him up and carrying him if BB-8 couldn't flawlessly roll over something (though BB probably pretended he couldn't just to be picked up by Poe).

It's a wonder that droid got anything done at all! You remember when you first brought him online and he assumed you were some nefarious individual who had hurt his pilot and friend.

It wasn't until you physically brought the astromech in to see the unconscious and feverish Poe to earn that little droid's trust. With BB-8's know-how, you were able to fix a few systems in your own defunct protocol droid that you honestly assumed you'd have to fully replace, making it that much cheaper to get the old droid up and running. Once they left, anyway. You weren't in a rush to have the help anymore. You liked having Poe around, his stupid snarky comments and weird giggle of his...

And you'd be lying if you didn't catch yourself staring, sometimes, too when he was working on helping with your monthly harvest.

He was skinny from lack of decent rations, when you brought him in, but after being with you for a few weeks, getting a proper diet and food in him, he bulked up.

He was muscular, sure, but not that almost scarily-defined tone so many found attractive. Poe's figure had softened out around his muscles, giving his belly a slight pooch and the dimples on his back to become more prominent. The softness was certainly appealing...

He looked handsome healthy.

Why did you just think that? Why did you just--

Your hands stopped as you tied down your equipment for the coming storm system that was approaching from the north, and you looked up to observe Poe for a moment.

Poe was busy helping cover your younger plants so they could survive the tough winds. He'd even helped corral Cviki into his créche so he wouldn't get injured. As thick as his carapace was, all it would take was one piece of debris to shred his wings and he could risk being permanently grounded.

Cviki seemed to socialize with Poe rather well, chittering and purring when Poe would pat his bulbous head, his wings fluttering curiously and excitedly when Poe would launch a small branch in the air for him to fetch and bring back.

Poe was a masterful pilot--if his words were to be believed--but something inside you told him he was also suited for a calmer life. Like yours, running a farm, taking care of the animals; not fighting in a near-pointless cycle you couldn't understand.

But, it was his choice to make, and his life to live. And nobody in the galaxy could take it from him.

But little did you know, that you were already tempting him to...

You rushed then, to tighten the wenches on the equipment bindings as Poe covered the fresh plants, grunting as the wind tousled his hair into his face and struggled to get the tarps down.

You look up at the sky and frown when the angry and flashing storm clouds approach faster than anticipated. It could be a short, fast-moving storm, that was the hope.

But you were worried. If the clouds began to circle...

At least you had a cellar.

"Poe! Come on! The plants are covered!" You wince when a small twig is caught in the wind and smacks into one of your lekku as the wind pushes them about. You forgot to wear your sheath today and were paying for it.

"You sure?" He called out to you.

"Yeah! Trust me, I'm sure! Now we need to get inside before the main storm hits!" You wave your hand. "Wachamio!"

Poe took the spare second to slam the mallet down on the stake for one last measure, before hopping to his feet, BB-8 chirping and tweeting from the threshold of your door, urging you both to hurry up.

Once inside, you quickly spin around and use the metal bar and slot it into place so the door wouldn't blow inwards on you; all your windows had been properly covered and locked with the metal panels so they wouldn't get blown in as well.

Not one moment later, you begin to hear the first fat raindrops pelt the walls and roof of your home from outside, deep rolling thunder announcing the arrival.

"Well, uh... You ever play sabacc?" Poe grinned awkwardly, and you slowly grinned.

BB-8 made a sound that could be universally translated in any language as: "I've got a bad feeling about this."

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It was just downright unfair. Clearly the universe did not favor him, or his hands at this sabacc game...

He was down to his socks and underwear while you were confidently sitting across the table, the only things missing from your outfit was your shirt, leaving you in your breastband only from the waist up, showing off the small scars and loosely defined muscles from your hard-working lifestyle poking through the light softness of your body.

You lean in as you see him begin to sweat, frowning at the cards in his hand. You'd both agreed on a simple game of sabacc, but because there were no credits to be put in the pot, you both settled on your clothes as the storm waxed and waned outside, rattling the walls and making his ears pop. He wondered how the sensitive little cones that were your sensory organs felt in the storm. Could ear-cones pop? It was a thought for another time.

"What's the matter, Mor'ski?" You rest your chin in your palm, grinning like a firaxan shark.

"...Afraid you can't bring much to the table?"

Oh, that was a low blow. He could feel the blush rise in his neck as his face heated up.

"Hah! Please, I doubt you could handle aaaallll this." Poe sputtered as he leaned back and huffed, forcing his confident demeanor back to the surface.

"Oh, I d'nno... I've probably handled farming equipment that was bigger." You toss back, moving a fresh pick between your lips and teeth as you boredly thumb through your cards.

"...Okay now you're just being mean."

"Hmm..." You look back up at him, a cold smile on your soft-looking lips. Poe felt a cold shiver creep up his spine when you looked at him.

And it was even worse when you flattened your cards on the table.

"Pure sabacc."

"Kriff!" Poe groaned, slapping his own bad hand on the table and pushing his hand through his curls.

"Oh, come on! I'm down to my skivvies, here!" He whined.

"Oh, I know." You giggle, batting your eyelashes at him and your lekku curl upwards a bit. "I'm not planning on making you completely strip. I'm feeling merciful..." You purred.

"...What are you planning?"

"The storm's let up a bit for now..." You hum casually, tapping your fingers on the top of your worn wooden table.

Poe blinked at you, his eyebrows raised up on his forehead. "No way..."

"One solid minute." You say, sticking your finger up. "Run around in the rain for one solid minute."

"Oh, come on!" Poe groaned, slapping his fist on the table.

BB-8 chirped and spun in a circle, almost laughing.

"Oh, whose side are you on?!" Poe glared at the droid with a scowl.

BB-8 whistled and wheeled over to your side, beeping and whirring in reply, making you grin even wider.

"You said you're a man of your word, Dameron..." You chuckle.

"....Agh! Kriff, why are women like this?!" Poe groaned, scrambling his hands through his raven curls.

"A bet's a bet..."

"Fine!" Poe scoffed, shooting to his feet and marching over to the front door, where your boots both lay.

He grumbled under his breath the whole time as he shoved his feet into them. Ah, well, at least the view from behind was nice...

You bite your lip as he pulls the metal bar free and the door rattles from the sudden gust of wind. Poe grabs the latch and it takes most of his strength to keep it from swinging open.

Oh, the moment he darted out into the freezing rain was glorious. The yelp he made as the first freezing drops made contact with his skin had you squirming and cackling madly as you clapped your hands and stamped your feet excitedly, BB-8 spinning in place and tweeting loudly.

He ran in a circle with his arms held out wide, shouting expletives the whole time as bumps erupted all over his body as his boots squished in the mud.

Once the minute was over with, Poe scurried back inside, soaked to the bone and shivering, his teeth chattering as he looked at you.

"Happy...?" Poe grunted.

"Very much so." You giggle girlishly.

"Good because I'm never playing sabacc with you again."

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You both sat on the fence, watching as Kari ate from her feed trough, bellowing in between bites, her thick tail swaying as she eats.

"So..." Poe began.

"Hm?" You mused, spitting the weed from between your teeth.

"I still have that cache hidden in the canyon... I mean, I know you've already helped me out and everything but..."

You quirk your brow inquisitively. "You want me to help you transport it to the spaceport."

"...Well. Okay, I mean... Eh. Yeah..?" He said awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. "I don't have a mode of transportation or anything, and... I can give you a cut?"

You slowly look at him, blinking. "You'd pay me to help?"

"Yeah! I don't see why not... Plus it'll help pay back and replace the bacta patches I used... Might help pay for parts for that droid of yours..."

Your teeth gnaw at the inside of your cheek, thinking hard as you look down at the mud. He made some good points... He has no ride, he still needs those credits or his near death would have been for nothing...

And those credits really could help you out.

"Okay, Mor'ski. I'm in." You reply, slapping your palm into his.

Poe grinned and gave your hand a firm tug.

"Knew you would be, doll. Now let's get to it."

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You watched as Poe slid the last crate into the cart next to BB-8, fastening them down with wench straps so nothing moved. There had been no sign of gutkurrs since the two of you returned to the canyon, but that's also probably from the musk bombs you made to irritate their sense of smell.

Maybe if he'd hired a local guide through the canyons he wouldn't have gotten so screwed in the first place.

But if he did, he wouldn't have met you.

Hindsight is... well. A funny thing when you think about it.

"Do you even know what's in those crates?" You ask him as you mount Kari's saddle.

"Eh... no." Poe cringed.

"Did you ever think to check??" You frown at him.

Poe's gloved hands pat the crate in front of him, and even BB-8 whirs curiously.

"Ryloth is known for its spice production, Poe..." You sigh softly. "Interspace gangs like to use it for drugs, remember?"

"Yeah..." He said, gnawing on his bottom lip.

Screw it.

He popped the latches and peeked into the crate.

There were different objects, all bearing the sigil of the old Empire. Poe felt his blood run cold as he tossed the lid completely open, and began rifling through it.

Several objects had the Empire logo scratched out, some had them painted over. It was clear this cache no longer belonged to them, but...

"What is it?" You ask him.

"...A bunch of old Empire junk. The weapons are pretty much useless, their cells are drained. There's a few other things in here, but... They look like they'd only be useful to a damn collector than anybody of importance." Poe said, his body relaxed slightly. Nothing really dangerous were in these crates...

Except.

"Holy kriff." He breathed, reaching down to a small wooden box. It was half a foot long, and surprisingly, there was an image burned into the lid. A symbol he knew well as a young man, scrawled and graffiti'd on many Empire propaganda posters.

The symbol of the Jedi Order.

"What?" You asked, turning to look at him.

Poe reached in and pulled out a lightsaber. Its once shiny metal surface scuffed and dented, the black tips at the end of the handle flaked of paint, the clip snapped long ago. This lightsaber had been through hell, and had probably even seen action as far back as the Clone Wars...

"Is... Is that..." You stumble.

"A kriffing lightsaber." Poe said reverently. He slowly and carefully set the lightsaber back inside the velvet lined box, closing it and gently placing it back inside the crate.

"Nothing in here is dangerous, except the lightsaber, maybe. But nobody really knows how to use these except..."

"Jedi and Sith." You murmur. "Who would want that stuff if it's useless?"

"Like I said, a collector maybe. Or a dealer in war relics." Poe said, closing the crate again.

"Poe..."

"I know, but c'mon... Let's get going while we still got the sun."

"Right." You say slowly. You pat Kari's flank and jerk your head. "Get on, Mor'ski. We got at least a two hours' ride ahead of us."

Poe seemed wary. He'd ridden in the cart the whole trek out here, and all the failed attempts to ride that blurrg of yours made him hesitant to hop on her.

"Relax, if I'm riding with you, she'll be fine. Unless you wanna ride Cviki?" You smile wryly, the both of you looking up to where Cviki was poking at the rocks with his beak, his mandibles picking up smaller insectoids to munch on here and there.

"...No I'm good." He looked back at you as he stepped up to Kari's side.

As he grabbed onto your open palm with his, he looked at you with curiosity in his dark eyes.

"You good yourself, crazy lady?" He jabbed playfully.

"Rahn fanyo. Er... I'm fine." You mumble as he takes his seat behind you, politely placing his hands on your waist.

It was a gentlemanly thing to do, to avoid grabbing anything he shouldn't... but once Kari got into a good and decent trot, he'd bounce off her haunches faster than a blood fly.

"Poe, you're gonna need to hold on tighter than that. Or I'm gonna leave you in the dust and collect this bounty myself..."

Poe chuckled and awkwardly looped his arms around your waist, carefully adjusting it so your sensitive lekku were draped over his shoulders, so he couldn't squish them on accident.

"Like this?"

You rolled your eyes and tugged his hands until they were almost clasped together and his chin was practically on your shoulder. "There. Because being polite while riding a blurrg is gonna get you a concussion, yahte."

"Okay, you gotta teach me Ryl, doll." Poe chuckled.

You smirked over your shoulder as you snapped Kari's reins, nudging her with your heels.

"That would ruin the fun, Mor'ski."

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You watched as a group of children fed Cviki fruit out of their palms, giggling and laughing when his long tongue unfurled to wrap around their fingers and clean their hands of any lingering juices left over. Cviki was very approachable, for a cen-cell.

Kari on the other hand... She didn't really like anybody other than you. And, well, maybe Poe now, you supposed.

You sighed as you watched Poe speak with his contact, a rather fat Twi'lek man who was obviously well off. A broker, you supposed. One who sets up people with jobs like these. Technically avoiding any trouble with the law because brokers around these parts were simply like bulletin boards for smugglers, you could pick what jobs they conveniently had around, and if you got in trouble, they could disavow any connections to you while still making decent credits.

And it was obviously a very good front he was wearing, judging by the bejeweled rings squished onto the man's fat fingers.

When the two began walking over to you, you groaned softly, Kari huffing when she sensed your irritation. You detested people walking up to you when you didn't want to talk.

Your emotions were high for reasons you couldn't quite place, and a feeling of anxiety gnawed in the pit of your stomach.

Poe was leaving.

Soon, he would load the cargo onto this broker's ship and he would leave Ryloth, possibly forever. You couldn't blame him, after almost getting turned into a tasty snack for a pack of gutkurrs.

"And this lovely woman must be the person who saved your skin, eh, Dameron?" The Twi'lek man chortled, his fat jiggling merrily as he elbowed Poe in the side.

His thin mouth was stretched wide, making his cheeks appear even larger and more plump, his bright yellow skin drawing little attention to his sharp teeth.

"Yep, my savior all right. Worked me right to the bone to pay back half my debt to her after those ugly bugs tried to snack on me." Poe grinned back.

"My my, sounds like a keeper!" The man smirked suggestively at you two.

You rolled your eyes and curled your lekku slightly. The gesture was hidden behind you, but anyone walking by could see the irritation and hostility in the gesture.

Men have tried to get your attention for years, and certainly, a man of status like this was always looking for aides or escorts of some kind. That life wasn't for you, not one tiny bit.

"She's.... Uh. A good friend." Poe said, smiling at you.

His soft eyes eased the tension in you somewhat, but you were still jittery and anxious. One, about Poe leaving; two, all the people bustling about the spaceport; and three, these confusing kriffing feelings regarding the quirky pilot.

The Twi'lek man handed Poe a small box, likely containing his payment, and BB-8 drove into his shins twice.

"I know, I know, buddy! I was getting to that!" Poe sighed exasperatedly at the astromech.

"I'll make sure the dock officials don't snoop, say our goodbyes." The broker winked as he turned to walk away.

"So..." Poe awkwardly began.

"Mhm." You hum.

"I'm glad you dragged my sorry carcass out of that canyon." Poe chuckled, his fingers nervously brushing the sides of the box he held.

"I'm happy my effort wasn't wasted when Kari didn't eat you." You snort in reply, smiling despite yourself.

Poe laughed softly and opened the box, plucking up a few chips into his fist. He held out his hand and placed the silver and gold chips into your palm gently.

"Here. I'm a man of my word, remember?" He smiled at you warmly. "And I promised you a cut. This should cover the bacta, and some parts for that droid of yours. Plus, y'know. To get yourself somethin' nice."

When he winked, you felt a flush rise to your cheeks as you laughed.

"Yeah, well..." You shrugged, not sure what to say.

"...Hey." Poe said, his bottom lip sliding beneath his teeth for a moment before licking it.

"So, I know this is sudden, but--"

"Sir! Your ship is cleared and ready to go! You got five minutes!" A dockhand shouted from nearby, startling Kari to the point she made a concerned bellow and stumbled back a bit.

You shove the credits into your belt pouch, and coo and shush at Kari, patting her down affectionately to ease her sudden fright as Poe shouts back at the dockhand.

"Ah... Great. Fun." Poe sighed as he turned back to you, noticing how your lekku were twitching and swaying as you struggled to calm your blurrg mount.

You didn't turn back to face him, biting your plush bottom lip as you patted down Kari, trying now to calm yourself as much as her.

Poe was leaving.

Probably one of the only people you'd call "friend" was leaving, and then you'd go right back to your boring tedium from before, while he flew headlong into danger with BB-8 by his side.

You couldn't really hear him as he spoke to you, imagining just how many horrible ways he could possibly die out there, at the hands of the First Order, or some pirate scum...

You did however, become aware of how close he was when he slipped an arm around your waist and tugged you against him. You barely had time to gasp and ask what he was doing when he pressed his lips against yours in a rushed, but fiery kiss.

He pulled back from you, winking as BB-8 whirled and trilled, spinning in place a few times.

"See ya around, doll. And next time I'm in town, I'll visit."

You were left, blinking, mouth agape as he sashayed with that new gait of his towards the hangar of his ship, BB-8 hot on his heels, tweeting a farewell at you.

You stayed like that, the tips of your lekku twining around one another twice, your face flushed with a different shade as the ship shakily lifted off, blasting off into the clouds.

...If he did come back...

"Come on, Kari." You say softly before whistling to get Cviki's attention.

"Let's go get some shopping done."

Maybe you would buy yourself something nice to wear.

💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫

Poe sighed as his ship launched into hyperspace, feeling sad as he kissed Ryloth's atmosphere goodbye. It wasn't as beautiful or as sweet as your lips were, for sure.

But it made his heart throb with sadness all the same...

He punched in a few buttons and the hologram of the broker appeared as the message began to play.

"Poe, my boy! Safe travels. I'm sure you and your companion had a lovely farewell, no?" He chuckled gleefully.

Poe rolled his eyes as he continued. "My contact got word back to me, and she's pleased that the cargo was intact and was impressed you were alive! How about that?" The man clapped his hands and laughed again.

"Well, just letting you know," His eyes twinkled. "Miss Kanata sends her thanks and hopes you enjoy the extra credits she left in your pay!"

Poe frowned at the name.

Wait... Miss Who?

💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫

Leia watched as Poe studied the small hologram of a Twi'lek woman in front of him, squinting and mouthing the words as they left her lips.

The older woman smiled as she walked up to him, her long robes shuffling softly as her slippers padded the metal flooring of the base.

"Pick up a new language to learn, Poe?" She asked, her brown eyes shimmering as she sat next to him.

Poe almost jumped, unusually engrossed in the tutorial program he had been watching. He bashfully rubbed the back of his neck and laughed.

"You could say that." He replied.

"I noticed you walking with a limp, now, Poe." Her tone switched to a more affectionate and maternal tone. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah... Someone on Ryloth saved my hide from a bad sitch. Unfortunately I'm probably gonna be stuck with it forever, but I'd trade a limp for my life any day of the week." He grinned.

Leia hummed with a sweet smile as her eyes were drawn to the paused tutorial. "Fall in love with the local flavor, huh?" She grinned mischievously.

Poe stiffened and coughed into his hand, a blush to his cheeks.

"You... Could say that."

💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫

Twi'leki/Ryl translation:

Wachamio! = "Let's go!"

Ma sareen = "My Sweet"

Yana = "Yes"

Wa-janeel = "Follow me"

Rahn fanyo = "I'm fine" or, alternatively, "Don't worry"

Twi'leki/Ryl Phrases I've smacked together/come up with (idk I'm not a linguist):

Nu nala quin-nala wilo? = "Do you know where you are?"

Zul nala z'rate nala quora? = "Can you tell me your name?"

Su'un na, mesh'e yahte. = "Oh great, he's an idiot."

Yahte = "Idiot"

Mor'ski = "Flyboy"

[mishydraws]

Very... very unfortunate life update

Hi, everyone.

Ok, I don’t want to waste your time but I wanted to be upfront about what’s going on in my life just so you all know.

Last night I got what is probably one of the worst emails that could have ever appeared in my inbox? Our landlord has given us a 60-day notice to get out. For context, my mom and I have been living here since the year 2000. We have never been late on rent or missed a payment despite every difficulty life has thrown at us in that time and this has completely blindsided us.

We haven’t spoken to any of the neighbors yet but some of the wording on the notice makes me think that they may be kicking out the entire building. Or maybe they’re just targeting those of us in the non-renovated units because we’ve been here so long and they could charge a new tenant much more with a quick kitchen and bathroom upgrade. Renoviction is a new word I just learned. I don’t know. That’s what happened to my brother at his last apartment. They kicked out everyone in his building, renovated, raised the rent, then let new people move in.

They suddenly started increasing our rent every year like clockwork a few years ago so I’ve had a feeling they’ve been trying to price us out for a while but I didn’t know they could just… tell us to leave just because they can. Rent consistently paid up and everything for 24 years.

The notice we received really doesn’t say much so it’s all speculation I guess. It doesn’t state a reason why it just says we need to be gone by March 31st.

But basically, I’m really not doing well right now in all honesty. I slept for maybe an hour last night and it’s like a switch flipped in me as soon as I read the email. My stomach has had this weird knotted feeling ever since and I can’t stand up for more than a few minutes before needing to lie down again in case I either faint or vomit… I’m not sure which but it’s been this way since last night. I had to stand up at the sink to wash one singular dish from dinner and I could barely do it. At least I didn’t see the email until after I ate last night because I still have no appetite now.

However bad I’m feeling I know my mom is probably feeling worse. She has been for a while. She’s getting older and my dad is no longer alive. Aside from my brother and one irl friend I still see in person regularly, we have no family or other support system in this country and are well and truly on our own, staring down the barrel of homelessness if we can’t quickly secure a place and move decades worth of our life there before the end of March.

All of this to say, I don’t know what our usual art shenanigans here are going to look like during this time. I am incredibly stressed to the point where I am physically ill but I also can’t pause and step away because I do need the income that I receive from your support of me/my art here. It’s just the reality. I’ve never been particularly Big And Successful with what I do so your support means all the much more and makes a real impact on my life.

I am so sorry if this dampens your mood at all today or if you notice a decrease in the quality of art I’m able to deliver over the next few months but I will try my best to keep things rolling and let you know if there’s any particular delays to expect.

To top it off, I requested a tour of a nearby apartment last night (more expensive than our current) and the name of the person who just texted me back has the same name as our current landlord. Who wants to start taking bets? I know for a fact they own a lot of property in the area so this isn’t looking promising.

Anyways. Sorry for this downer of a post. If we’re not homeless in 2 months then… I dunno. I’ll have somewhere indoors to do art? Yay? You can imagine the housing market we’re dealing with being in California. The prospect of moving at this point has always been one of my biggest fears but we’ll see if we get lucky real fast 😢

If you've ever thought about supporting my Patreon or anything else, now and over the next few months might be a good time if you can swing it. Maybe it'll help us secure a place to move if I can point to it and be like 'Look! A whole income!' 🥲 Idk man.

There's an art update in the (public) post I made if you want to see what we're at least trying to work on for sticker club through all of this.

Mishy

[acceptccnow]

Advancements in E-Commerce Credit Card Processing Techniques

Article by Jonathan Bomser | CEO | Accept-Credit-Cards-Now.com

The digital realm of e-commerce is a constantly shifting landscape, adapting to meet the ever-evolving needs of contemporary consumers. In today's age, the seamless acceptance of credit card payments remains a critical element for businesses. This article explores the most recent strides in e-commerce credit card processing techniques and their transformative impact on the operations of online businesses.

DOWNLOAD THE ADVANCEMENTS IN E-COMMERCE INFOGRAPHIC HERE

The Evolution of E-Commerce Credit Card Processing E-commerce has undergone a remarkable journey from basic payment gateways to the sophisticated systems of today. These innovations not only enhance transaction convenience but also significantly elevate security standards.

The High-Risk Challenge In sectors such as CBD or credit repair, navigating credit card processing can be intricate. Recent developments offer tailored solutions with high-risk merchant accounts and accompanying high-risk payment gateways. These tools provide the flexibility and security required to manage transactions effectively in high-risk industries.

Tailored Solutions for E-Commerce Generic payment processing systems fall short for e-commerce businesses. Specialized e-commerce merchant accounts cater specifically to online retailers, offering more than just payment processing. They provide insights into customer behavior and trends, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions that enhance sales.

Streamlined Integration A significant advancement in e-commerce credit card processing is the seamless integration of payment gateways into websites. This integration eliminates the need for customers to leave the site to complete a transaction, thereby reducing cart abandonment rates. Online credit card processing becomes a natural part of the shopping journey.

The Role of Technology Cutting-edge technology, including machine learning and AI, plays a pivotal role in advancing credit card processing systems. Real-time detection and prevention of fraudulent transactions ensure the security of both businesses and customers. These technologies analyze extensive data, making instant decisions to approve or decline transactions.

The Future of E-Commerce Credit Card Processing With e-commerce's continued surge in popularity, the demand for enhanced payment processing solutions will only escalate. Looking forward, exciting developments such as biometric authentication for payments are anticipated, promising improved security and convenience. Additionally, the further integration of cryptocurrencies into e-commerce payment gateways is expected, expanding payment options for consumers.

Advancements in e-commerce credit card processing have reshaped the digital business landscape. From handling high-risk transactions to offering specialized e-commerce solutions, these developments streamline processes and bolster security. With technology's continual evolution, the future holds promising prospects for e-commerce payment processing.

[lt-banks]

Character Info

Lieutenant Holly "Fox" Banks - 32 - She/Her ╰┈➤ˎˊ˗ Stone PMC

Basics

Name: Holly Nadine Banks

Callsign: Fox

Nicknames: Hollz/Holls, Hol, Holly Dolly <- her dads nickname for her

Nationality: British

Birthplace: Birmingham, UK

Accent: Brummie

Sexuality: Bisexual

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

Appearance

Height: 5'4"

Physique: Slim, athletic build

Eyes: Green and bright

Hair: Bleached blonde - she usually has some natural brown roots visible

Other Features: She has ornate, watercolour roses tattooed on her collar bones and hip bones. She also has these same roses blooming amongst a spine bone tattooed on her back - "Growing a backbone" she calls it. She has her ear lobes pierced and her nipples.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

Personality and Quirks

Fiesty

Confident

Loyal

Cocky

Bossy

Protective

Hot headed

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

Other Info:

She loves cats. If she sees a stray, that stray is getting pets, no matter how scrunkly it looks.

Being from Birmingham and having a Brummie accent, often tacks on a "bab" or "babes" at the end of her sentences, as well as using other verbage local to the area like "Turrah/Ta'ra" to say goodbye.

She owns a cat called Nancy that stays with her elderly neighbor Mrs. Harris whilst she's deployed.

Fills her time outside of deployment with fitness classes. She likes reformer pilates, yoga and pole dance.

Her favourite genres of music are pop and uk garage.

She used to be a real party girl in her early 20's. Each time they were stationed somewhere with a bar or club, she would be there with her comrades.

She cannot hold her liquor. She's a lightweight.

Typical short girl with a scrappy attitude.

Supports Liverpool FC since her Dad was from Liverpool.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

Backstory:

Holly had a regular childhood growing up, up until she was 16. She was babysitting her younger sister Charlotte, who was a baby at the time whilst her parents were on a date night.

They never came home that night, instead, Holly answered the door later that evening to flashing blue and red lights, and a policeman solemnly explaining to her that her parents had died in a car accident.

This led to a rebellious two years in the care system, no other family to take them in, separated from her sister who was in a separate care home that focused on infants for a while. The loss of her parents and being separated from her sister caused a downfall. She failed her classes, isolated herself at school and caused issues at the home she was placed in. When she turned 18, with no real prospects, she made the decision to get out fast, turning to military recruitment in the British army which helped her regain routine and control over her frustrations.

Every time she returned home from deployment - she would visit her sister constantly, ensuring she never felt alone.

Eventually, after a number of years, she managed to get a down payment on a small apartment in the city of Birmingham, with the goal being to have Charlotte live with her once she was out of the care system, preventing her from having to make the drastic choices that Holly had to make at 18.

She found herself excelling in the role of a soldier, pushing herself further and further, eventually being offered a spot within Stone PMC. She trained closely with her Captain for a number of years, eventually showing the dedication and skills required for the role of Lieutenant.

Sometime after joining Stone PMC as a Sergeant in her mid twenties, she met her ex, Darren Gold - a salesman, in a nightclub. They hit it off and started dating after for about two years, eventually leading to him proposing to her. They were happy for a while, until Holly came back to her apartment early to surprise Darren, instead finding another woman in bed with him and all their photos together on the walls and around the apartment taken down and hidden.

He tried to blame the fact she would be deployed often and that her job as a mercenary emasculated him. This made Holly leave him, calling off the engagement.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

Stone PMC Information:

Stone PMC is a made-up Private Military Company, similar to Shadow Company but operating within the United Kingdom. They have a strong focus on stealth operations and intelligence gathering. The team are often called in for assistance with other groups, when they need the teams specialty skills or extra man-power.

Holly's team at Stone PMC consists of:

Captain Dominic Ruthers - Father figure, was there for her after catching Darren cheating on her. Has shaped her into the Lieutenant/Mercenary she is today.

Sergeant Wesley Oldham - Her best friend, ride or die. They like to take smoke breaks together to gossip.

Sergeant Bianca Sanders - Latest member of the team and younger. Reminds Holly of her sister and tends to baby Bianca a little. She just cares about her a lot.

Important note that Holly is a firm believer of found family, and in Stone PMC, she's truly found her family. They've been there for her, seen her at her worst and vice-versa.

Eventually, thanks to Laswell's careful liaisons, Stone PMC was acquired and merged with Task Force 141 as additional manpower.

Note: I am happy to RP as part of either Stone PMC or Task Force 141! *Blows a kiss at KorTac and Shadow Company*

[zeuscommercial]

A Beginner's Guide to Fix and Flip Lending for Real Estate Investors

Investing in real estate has long been a proven methodology for personal wealth development, and one of the hottest vehicles recently has been the fix-and-flip strategy. The essence of this strategy is purchasing properties, improving them to create additional value, and repurchasing at a profit. However, financing is one of the most crucial aspects of this strategy. Thus, this blog will be about everything fix-and-flip lending, especially what it is all about and how it can be maximally utilized in Alabama.

What is fix-and-flip lending?

Fix-and-flip lending usually refers to short-term loans for property investors who wish to buy, renovate, and sell houses. Such loans usually amount to the purchase price of the property as well as some part of the renovation costs. Fix and flip loans differ from conventional mortgages in that they are easier and faster to get, and they are designed to suit the investor who wants to conclude projects in a short period of time.

Key Features of Fix and Flip Loans

Short-Term Duration

Fix and flip loans typically have a term of from 6 to 18 months, so that, fittingly, this is the period to which most investors would require renovating and selling their property.

Flexible Loan Amounts

These often lend the amount required by the investor for the purchase price of property and renovation costs. Such systems suffice to make it easier for the investors in concentrating upon adding value to their projects.

Interest Rates

Similar to any other type of loan, fix-and-flip loans have a higher interest payment compared to traditional mortgages. Such is because of the nature of these loans being short-term and riskier.

Quick Approval Process

These loans can be approved and funded in a hurry so that investors can immediately get to act in very competitive real estate markets.

Benefits of Fix and Flip Lending

It would deliver the following features for fix-and-flip lending as a real estate investor.

Funds Accessibility: Even if an investor lacks cash at hand to buy and renovate the entire real estate property, he/she may get the loan from the lender.

Project-specific Funding: The loan is based on a project, covering purchase costs as well as renovation costs.

Market Flexibility: For instance, the opportunity for dynamic housing markets exists, such as in Alabama.

Fix and Flip Lending in Alabama

Real estate in Alabama offered lucrative opportunities for fix-and-flippers who would invest in their affordable price and real demand for renovated homes. Such projects flourished throughout the state. Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile, and other cities have emerged as continuously moving places with many prospective buyers looking for homes that resemble what they have recently seen.

It takes a good plan before any investor can venture into the Alabama fix and flip lending business. For consideration include the following:

Trends in the Local Market: Understanding specific neighborhoods' property valuation and buyers' preferences is crucial.

Cost of Renovations: Precise estimations go a long way in preventing excess spending.

Loan offers: Working with a lender who understands real estate in Alabama will ease the financing process.

How to Get Started with Fix and Flip Loans

Monitor and Detect Prospective Properties:

Properties that have got an apparently high potential for value addition and alteration but actually are found under serious disfigurements, neglect, and severe repairs are also great resale or wholesale properties.

Consider the Best Lender:

With reputed lenders like Zeus Commercial Capital, borrowing in a sometimes chaotic world turns very smooth and simple. They get real estate investor needs and things naturally offering them special and tailor-made solutions.

Draw Up an Impressive Framework:

And often the biggest and, of course, most impressive models have multi-million-dollar budgets and timelines put down into one place and include, among other things, purchase price, renovation fees, and contingency allowances.

Marketing the Loan:

Forward your loan application with all supporting documents, like the project plan, estimated costs, and property details.

Perform the Renovation:

Bring that reliable contractor on board and keep the renovations within your budget and time schedule.

Sell the property:

When all the renovations are done, put the property up for sale as best as possible.

Conclusion

It allows you to renovate and sell an asset or part of it. Fix-and-flip financing is great for all types of real estate investors who want to have financial flexibility in transforming potential projects into profits. And Alabama's booming real estate market offers some great opportunities for fixing and flipping.

Whether you are an experienced investor or just getting started, understanding the basics of fix and flip lending would be your first step toward success. Working with a knowledgeable lender such as Zeus Commercial Capital will help you navigate this journey and achieve your investment objectives.

[hydeordie]

Harrison Kinnane Smith Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company Final Dividend Check (1883), 2024 Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company final dividend check, rent-to-own contract, stewardship agreement.

Harrison Kinnane Smith’s collaborative work and site-specific interventions critique public institutions and financial systems. His practice departs from the intersection of critical geography and political economy. Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company Final Dividend Check (1883) (2024) constitutes the latest addition to Smith’s growing body of work exploring racial ideology in the history of American real estate law and finance. The artwork draws on the exploitative arrangements of two failed Reconstruction-era reparation programs in order to support a non-profit organization providing affordable housing at the site of these historical failures. Freedman’s Savings offers collectors the opportunity to purchase one of the last checks issued by the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, a bank chartered by the Lincoln Administration to serve freedpeople who were legally excluded by “White” banks. Depositors in the Freedman’s Bank who hoped to save towards land ownership instead found their savings nearly halved when corruption and mismanagement led the bank to close after less than a decade. The check — a final payment of $1.50 issued to a Savannah accountholder — is available to prospective buyers only through a lease-to-own agreement that replicates the land contracts issued under the 1865 “Forty Acres and a Mule” order. Just as emancipated Black Americans lost their land when the “Forty Acres” order was canceled, title to the check is promptly withdrawn and prospective buyers are left only with the contract carefully crafted to exclude them from full ownership. All proceeds generated by serial leasing of this work directly support the Savannah Community Land Trust.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist

Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you're a doctor, chances are you are required to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend two hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR.

How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in The American Prospect, Epic may be a clinical disaster, but it's a profit-generating miracle:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency."

In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno – a pregnant biologist – drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency – comparable to a major heart-attack – and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he'd put in charge of health care created the "Prospective Payment System," which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition and the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode "diabetes with no complications" from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60.

Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors' compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner's doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, "That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?"

Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine, he's got an insider's knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI.

The EHR industry's origins start with a GW Bush-era law called the HITECH Act, which was later folded into Obama's Recovery Act in 2009. Obama provided $27b to hospitals that installed EHR systems. These systems had to more than track patient outcomes – they also provided the data for pay-for-performance incentives. EHRs were already trying to do something very complicated – track health outcomes – but now they were also meant to underpin a cockamamie "incentives" program that was supposed to provide a carrot to the health industry so it would stop killing people and ripping off Medicare. EHRs devolved into obscenely complex spaghetti systems that doctors and nurses loathed on sight.

But there was one group that loved EHRs: hospital administrators and the private companies offering Medicare Advantage plans (which also benefited from upcoding patients in order to soak Uncle Sucker):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8649706/

The spread of EHRs neatly tracks with a spike in upcharging: "from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent…the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased":

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-18-00380.pdf

The purpose of a system is what it does. Epic's industry-dominating EHR is great at price-gouging, but it sucks as a clinical tool – it takes 18 keystrokes just to enter a prescription:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729481

Doctors need to see patients, but their bosses demand that they satisfy Epic's endless red tape. Doctors now routinely stay late after work and show up hours early, just to do paperwork. It's not enough. According to another one of Kuttner's sources, doctors routinely copy-and-paste earlier entries into the current one, a practice that generates rampant errors. Some just make up random numbers to fulfill Epic's nonsensical requirements: the same source told Kuttner that when prompted to enter a pain score for his TB patients, he just enters "zero."

Don't worry, Epic has a solution: AI. They've rolled out an "ambient listening" tool that attempts to transcribe everything the doctor and patient say during an exam and then bash it into a visit report. Not only is this prone to the customary mistakes that make AI unsuited to high-stakes, error-sensitive applications, it also represents a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of clinical notes.

The very exercise of organizing your thoughts and reflections about an event – such as a medical exam – into a coherent report makes you apply rigor and perspective to events that otherwise arrive as a series of fleeting impressions and reactions. That's why blogging is such an effective practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

The answer to doctors not having time to reflect and organize good notes is to give them more time – not more AI. As another doctor told Kuttner: "Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians."

EHRs are one of those especially hellish public-private partnerships. Health care doctrine from Reagan to Obama insisted that the system just needed to be exposed to market forces and incentives. EHRs are designed to allow hospitals to win as many of these incentives as possible. Epic's clinical care modules do this by bombarding doctors with low-quality diagnostic suggestions with "little to do with a patient’s actual condition and risks," leading to "alert fatigue," so doctors miss the important alerts in the storm of nonsense elbow-jostling:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058605/

Clinicians who actually want to improve the quality of care in their facilities end up recording data manually and keying it into spreadsheets, because they can't get Epic to give them the data they need. Meanwhile, an army of high-priced consultants stand ready to give clinicians advise on getting Epic to do what they need, but can't seem to deliver.

Ironically, one of the benefits that Epic touts is its interoperability: hospitals that buy Epic systems can interconnect those with other Epic systems, and there's a large ecosystem of aftermarket add-ons that work with Epic. But Epic is a product, not a protocol, so its much-touted interop exists entirely on its terms, and at its sufferance. If Epic chooses, a doctor using its products can send files to a doctor using a rival product. But Epic can also veto that activity – and its veto extends to deciding whether a hospital can export their patient records to a competing service and get off Epic altogether.

One major selling point for Epic is its capacity to export "anonymized" data for medical research. Very large patient data-sets like Epic's are reasonably believed to contain many potential medical insights, so medical researchers are very excited at the prospect of interrogating that data.

But Epic's approach – anonymizing files containing the most sensitive information imaginable, about millions of people, and then releasing them to third parties – is a nightmare. "De-identified" data-sets are notoriously vulnerable to "re-identification" and the threat of re-identification only increases every time there's another release or breach, which can used to reveal the identities of people in anonymized records. For example, if you have a database of all the prescribing at a given hospital – a numeric identifier representing the patient, and the time and date when they saw a doctor and got a scrip. At any time in the future, a big location-data breach – say, from Uber or a transit system – can show you which people went back and forth to the hospital at the times that line up with those doctor's appointments, unmasking the person who got abortion meds, cancer meds, psychiatric meds or other sensitive prescriptions.

The fact that anonymized data can – will! – be re-identified doesn't mean we have to give up on the prospect of gleaning insight from medical records. In the UK, the eminent doctor Ben Goldacre and colleagues built an incredible effective, privacy-preserving "trusted research environment" (TRE) to operate on millions of NHS records across a decentralized system of hospitals and trusts without ever moving the data off their own servers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

The TRE is an open source, transparent server that accepts complex research questions in the form of database queries. These queries are posted to a public server for peer-review and revision, and when they're ready, the TRE sends them to each of the databases where the records are held. Those databases transmit responses to the TRE, which then publishes them. This has been unimaginably successful: the prototype of the TRE launched during the lockdown generated sixty papers in Nature in a matter of months.

Monopolies are inefficient, and Epic's outmoded and dangerous approach to research, along with the roadblocks it puts in the way of clinical excellence, epitomizes the problems with monopoly. America's health care industry is a dumpster fire from top to bottom – from Medicare Advantage to hospital cartels – and allowing Epic to dominate the EHR market has somehow, incredibly, made that system even worse.

Naturally, Kuttner finishes out his article with some antitrust analysis, sketching out how the Sherman Act could be brought to bear on Epic. Something has to be done. Epic's software is one of the many reasons that MDs are leaving the medical profession in droves.

Epic epitomizes the long-standing class war between doctors who want to take care of their patients and hospital executives who want to make a buck off of those patients.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[t1gerlilly]

The end of the fat American and the election of Trump

Most Europeans are used to mocking Americans for their weight, without any sense of why Americans are fat. Culturally, that is.

There are a lot of factors. But primarily, the cheapest food has a lot of calories. And the one thing that has always been cheap in the US is food.

It’s actually artificially cheap, due to the last vestiges of Depression-era programs intended to prop up farmers and prevent widespread hunger.

Despite this, even before the pandemic 20% of American children were food insecure and occasionally went hungry. During the pandemic, due to the freezing of school loans and evictions and federal payments, people had time with their families and enough money to pay down some credit card debt. The end of that was very, very hard - with months of unmet obligations sometimes coming as a balloon payment. On top of that, the one thing that had been reliably cheap, food, increased sharply. Eggs, for example, are almost double the price they were a few years ago.

Many Americans said that the price hikes, which were part inflation and part price gouging, significantly or severely impacted their lives. They desperately wanted to go back to a time when things were easier.

Americans have been voting for whatever candidate looked like they would make the most change since Obama. They feel trapped in a system that doesn’t see them or help them. This is particularly the case for those with limited education and job prospects.

When the Arab spring happened, many people were surprised. But it made sense to me. Most people don’t care who runs the world or their country. As long as they can work, and worship, and feed their children.

When your children are hungry, you’ll do anything and believe anyone that tells you they’ll make things better.

Trump won’t, of course, and things are likely to get far worse. I can’t help but think the world may end up mourning the loss of the fat American.

[dhaaruni]

Ask people the reasons for women’s troubles in India, and they point to a cluster of patriarchal norms. The fact that, after marriage, a wife tends to move in with her husband’s family corrodes her support system and discourages parents from investing in daughters as opposed to sons. Women are often urged not to work, and their absence of an income deprives them of bargaining power within the household. And divorce, though legally recognized, is still treated like a blight on a family’s honor, tainting the marriage prospects of the divorcée, her siblings, and her children. Even if women escape abusive relationships, a lack of professional training can make it hard for them to live alone.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

That fact rose its ugly head yet again today when Judge Juan Merchan delayed sentencing Donald Trump in the New York hush money fraud case in which a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, several of which were related to his attempt to conceal the payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the presidential election in 2016. 

Reading Judge Merchan’s order is like being in a room with a middle-aged man on his first day in a yoga class, pain leaching from every corpuscle of his body as he contorts himself into making a decision he clearly believes not in the interest of either justice or the wellbeing of the country.  The order begins this way:

“By letter dated August 14, 2024, Defendant requests an adjournment of his sentencing, currently scheduled for September 18, 2024, until after the 2024 presidential election. He argues the adjournment is necessary to provide adequate time to ‘assess and pursue’ appellate options in the event this Court denies his pending Criminal Procedure Law ("CPL') S 330.30 motion and to avoid the potential ‘politically prejudicial’ impact that a public sentencing could have on him and his prospects in the upcoming election.  He attempts to bolster his application by repeating a litany of perceived and unsubstantiated grievances from previous filings that do not merit this Court’s attention and will not be addressed in this Decision.”

The judge’s quotes from Trump’s letter are proper given the nature of the order, but let me tell you, along with his dismissal of Trump’s “unsubstantiated grievances,” they are included to reflect the contempt Merchan has for Trump, his lawyers, and his request to delay sentencing. 

Take a step back for a moment.  This is the judge that Trump trashed every single day of the trial that concluded by finding him guilty on all counts.  He is the judge who found Trump in contempt of court ten times for various violations of gag orders imposed to prevent the defendant from harassing his clerk and employees and relatives of the prosecutors and other persons associated with the New York court system, including the judge’s own daughter.  The 10th time Merchan found Trump in contempt, after fining him $1,000, he threatened him with jail time.  Merchan had already fined Trump $9.000 for his previous violations.  Trump had attacked the judge’s daughter as “a rabid Trump hater,” among other slurs, and Merchan sanctioned him for that, as well as forbidding him from discussing any relatives of anyone associated with the case.  Trump had also attacked the make-up of the jury.  He made thinly veiled threats against witnesses in the case that Merchan warned Trump against but did not find contemptuous.

Defendants in criminal trials don’t do this stuff unless the defendant’s name is Donald Trump. 

In his order, Merchan cited the unprecedented nature of criminally sentencing a candidate for president: “This matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this Nation's history,” Merchan wrote.  He also included a statement of impartiality and purpose that you would not ordinarily find in such a judicial order:  “This adjournment request has now been decided in the same way this Court has decided every other issue that has arisen since the origination of this case, applying the facts and the law after carefully considering the issues and respective arguments of the parties to ensure that the integrity of the proceeding is protected, justice is served, and the independence of this judiciary kept firmly intact.”  The statement is, without citing instances of Trump’s continual disruption of his trial with lies, slander, and bluster, a defense of the integrity of the judicial process, which Merchan was caused to do almost daily during the trial.

All of this is unprecedented.  The nature of the crime is unprecedented:  a presidential candidate paying off a porn star to conceal a sexual affair from the voters; the defendant being a candidate for president during his trial; the contemptuous behavior of the defendant during the trial; the contempt of the defendant for the jury and the verdict; and of course, before the defendant was sentenced, the intervention of the Supreme Court that found Trump immune from prosecution for official acts taken while president, at least several of which – the signing of checks to Michael Cohen by Trump in the Oval Office – the defense will contend somehow fit the definition of “official acts.”

Trump wants the sentencing hearing postponed so that voters will not know whether he has been sentenced to jail for his crimes in New York.  That is unprecedented, too, just as was Trump not wanting voters in 2016 to know that he had paid hush-money to a porn star. 

Whether voters would take into consideration the judge’s sentence is almost irrelevant.  At this point, voters are faced daily with face-slaps of Trump’s misbehavior and madness, his jumble of unintelligible remarks and lies about childcare before the Economic Club of New York the other day being one of the most recent.  The Economic Club of New York includes among its membership people Trump wanted so badly to respect him when he was a real estate developer and citizen of Manhattan.  They are the uppermost crust of the upper crust of New York society and business – members of the clubs Trump wanted to belong to such as the Union League and Metropolitan Club and other mahogany-and-brass-fittings temples of the Manhattan elite.

And yet there he was, mumbling and lying and stumbling through a discussion any parent in America could speak about coherently: 

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, childcare is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send products into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.”

The phrase, word-salad, is inadequate to describe what he said to that roomful of business executives and economic experts.  What could he have been thinking?

Well, he wasn’t thinking.  He was just flapping his jaws incomprehensibly, because that is what works for him out there among his MAGA faithful.  They don’t have childcare they can afford, and they don’t care that Trump has no plans to get it for them, because that is not what they want from him.  What they want is hate, of which he supplies copious quantities, which is not unprecedented in this country, and that in itself is a problem and has been since our founding as a nation.

Just as Judge Merchan had to take into consideration who the jury found guilty in his courtroom and upon whom he has to deliver sentence, I am afraid that the rest of us are saddled with a similar burden.  We have a monster in our midst.  We are trying to bar the monster from the White House as we did in 2020, but even if we succeed, he will not be gone, not in person, nor in the excretory politics he has encouraged among the citizenry. 

We are not a monstrous country, not yet anyway, but we have always had the tendency to become one.  We avoided such a fate only by Civil War once in our history.  We will find out in November if defeating Trump at the ballot box will enable us to go forward as a nation without resorting to violence. 

We can only vote, and hope.

Lucian Truscott Newsletter

[hawkins-university]

Explore the Benefits of Earning an Online Professional Degree at Hawkins University

In today's fast-paced world, the traditional pathways to higher education are evolving, making way for more flexible and accessible options. Online education has emerged as a game-changer, allowing students to pursue their academic and career goals without compromising their personal and professional commitments. Among the various online learning opportunities available, professional degrees stand out for their potential to significantly enhance your career prospects. Hawkins University, a leader in online education, offers a range of professional degree programs designed to equip you with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in your chosen field. In this blog post, we will explore the numerous benefits of earning an online professional degree from Hawkins University.

1. Flexibility to Learn at Your Own Pace

One of the most compelling advantages of earning an online professional degree at Hawkins University is the flexibility it offers. Unlike traditional on-campus programs, online degrees allow you to study at your own pace and on your own schedule. Whether you're a working professional, a parent, or someone with other commitments, Hawkins University's online programs are designed to fit into your busy lifestyle. You can access course materials, participate in discussions, and complete assignments from anywhere in the world, at any time that suits you.

2. Access to High-Quality Education

Hawkins University is committed to providing a high-quality education that rivals that of traditional institutions. The university's online professional degree programs are designed by industry experts and experienced faculty members who bring real-world knowledge into the virtual classroom. The curriculum is regularly updated to reflect the latest trends and advancements in your field, ensuring that you receive a relevant and up-to-date education. Moreover, Hawkins University offers a robust support system, including academic advisors, career counselors, and technical assistance, to help you succeed in your studies.

3. Cost-Effective Education

Pursuing a professional degree can be a significant financial investment, but Hawkins University strives to make education more affordable. Online programs typically eliminate many of the costs associated with on-campus education, such as commuting, housing, and campus fees. Additionally, Hawkins University offers a variety of financial aid options, including scholarships, grants, and payment plans, to help you manage the cost of your education. This makes earning a professional degree more accessible and less burdensome on your finances.

4. Diverse Range of Programs

Hawkins University offers a diverse range of online professional degree programs, catering to various industries and career paths. Whether you're interested in business, healthcare, technology, or education, you can find a program that aligns with your career goals. Each program is designed to provide you with the specialized knowledge and skills required to excel in your chosen field. Additionally, the university's strong network of alumni and industry connections can open doors to new career opportunities and professional growth.

5. Career Advancement Opportunities

Earning an online professional degree from Hawkins University can significantly enhance your career prospects. Many employers value the dedication and self-discipline required to complete an online degree, and the skills you acquire during your studies can set you apart from other candidates. Whether you're looking to advance in your current job, switch careers, or start your own business, a professional degree from Hawkins University can provide you with the credentials and confidence you need to achieve your goals. Furthermore, the university offers career services to assist you in job placement, resume building, and interview preparation.

6. Networking Opportunities

While online education may seem solitary, Hawkins University fosters a strong sense of community among its students and alumni. Through virtual classrooms, discussion forums, and social media groups, you can connect with fellow students, faculty, and industry professionals from around the world. These connections can lead to valuable networking opportunities, collaborations, and lifelong friendships. Hawkins University also hosts webinars, workshops, and events where you can engage with experts in your field and stay informed about industry trends.

7. Personal Growth and Development

Earning a professional degree online is not just about acquiring technical skills; it's also an opportunity for personal growth and development. The process of balancing your studies with other responsibilities teaches you valuable time management, communication, and problem-solving skills. Additionally, the diverse perspectives you encounter in an online learning environment can broaden your understanding of different cultures and viewpoints, making you a more well-rounded individual. Hawkins University is dedicated to helping you grow both professionally and personally, preparing you for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

8. Global Recognition and Accreditation

Hawkins University is recognized globally for its commitment to excellence in education. The university's online professional degree programs are fully accredited, ensuring that your degree is respected by employers and institutions around the world. Accreditation is a mark of quality that guarantees you are receiving an education that meets rigorous academic standards. This recognition can give you a competitive edge in the global job market and increase your earning potential.

9. A Pathway to Lifelong Learning

The journey doesn't end once you earn your degree. Hawkins University encourages lifelong learning and offers a variety of continuing education opportunities to help you stay ahead in your field. Whether you're interested in pursuing advanced certifications, attending workshops, or enrolling in additional degree programs, Hawkins University provides the resources and support you need to continue your education and achieve your career aspirations.

Conclusion

In conclusion, earning an online professional degree from Hawkins University is a smart investment in your future. With flexible learning options, high-quality education, cost-effective programs, and a wide range of career advancement opportunities, Hawkins University is the ideal choice for anyone looking to enhance their skills and achieve their professional goals. If you're ready to take the next step in your career, explore the online professional degree programs at Hawkins University and discover how they can transform your life.

Visit Hawkins University to learn more about the programs and take the first step towards a brighter future.

[acceptccnow]

The Future of Payment Processing in High-Risk Sectors

Article by Jonathan Bomser | CEO | Accept-Credit-Cards-Now.com

In today's swiftly evolving digital sphere, payment processing takes on a pivotal role in the prosperity of enterprises across diverse sectors. One particular niche demanding a bespoke approach is high-risk payment processing. From e-commerce enterprises to credit restoration services and the burgeoning CBD market, navigating the intricate terrain of high-risk sectors necessitates a state-of-the-art solution. In this article, we will delve into the prospects of payment processing for high-risk industries, elucidating the critical role played by merchant accounts, payment gateways, and credit card processing services.

DOWNLOAD THE FUTURE OF PAYMENT PROCESSING INFOGRAPHIC HERE

The Transformation of High-Risk Payment Processing To grasp the future of high-risk payment processing, it's prudent to first acknowledge the journey so far. Traditional payment processing systems frequently hesitated to engage with high-risk enterprises due to their associated heightened risks. Nevertheless, with technological progress and an increasing acceptance of these sectors, payment processors have adapted.

The Significance of Merchant Accounts Merchant accounts have emerged as the bedrock of high-risk payment processing. They provide enterprises with a platform for accepting various payment methods, including credit card payments. Merchant accounts furnish the essential stability and credibility that high-risk sectors require to flourish.

The Role of Payment Gateways Payment gateways serve as the conduit between your online store and the customer's financial institution. They play a pivotal role in ensuring secure and efficient transactions. Payment gateway solutions tailored for high-risk enterprises have evolved to cater to the distinctive needs of these sectors, offering augmented security features and fraud prevention measures.

High-Risk Credit Card Processing High-risk credit card processing represents a game-changing advancement for enterprises operating in more precarious industries. It facilitates the acceptance of credit card payments, delivering convenience to customers and fueling sales. Equipped with rigorous security protocols and advanced technology, high-risk credit card processing is laying the foundation for a safer and more secure payment environment.

E-commerce Payment Processing The realm of e-commerce is witnessing a surge in growth, and with it comes an escalated demand for seamless e-commerce payment processing. High-risk businesses in this domain necessitate dependable solutions capable of handling substantial transaction volumes without compromising on security. Thankfully, payment processors are stepping up to the plate, offering tailor-made e-commerce merchant accounts attuned to the distinct prerequisites of these enterprises.

Credit Repair Payment Processing Credit restoration services frequently operate in a high-risk milieu. Nevertheless, the demand for credit repair merchant processing is undeniable. As consumers seek to enhance their credit scores, these enterprises require specialized payment solutions equipped to handle the delicate nature of their services.

CBD Payment Processing The CBD industry teeters on the precipice of explosive growth, but it's accompanied by its own set of challenges, notably regulatory intricacies. CBD payment processing is the linchpin for unleashing the potential of this sector. High-risk payment processors are stepping forward to furnish customized solutions, enabling CBD enterprises to accept credit card payments and extend their customer base.

The outlook for payment processing in high-risk sectors is bright and promising. With continual technological advancement, the payment processing landscape will become even more accommodating to enterprises in these domains. From the acceptance of credit cards for CBD to the provision of credit repair merchant account solutions, payment processors are spearheading a transformation in the way high-risk enterprises conduct their operations. Embracing these innovations is not a mere choice; it's an imperative for enterprises aiming to thrive in this dynamic milieu.

[iraqdinar]

Zimbabwe’s “RTGS Dollar” Can Be Used to Purchase New Gold Coins; Not So for 2008 Zim Inflation Currency

Zimbabwe's Central Bank recently introduced a new set of gold coins in a bid to boost the country's economy. The coins, which come in denominations of 2, 5, 10, and 20 Zimbabwean dollars, are said to be made from locally sourced gold.

The introduction of the new coins has been met with mixed reactions, with some Zimbabweans expressing excitement at the prospect of having a new form of currency, while others have raised concerns about the practicality of using gold coins in everyday transactions.

Which Zim Currencies Can Be Used to Purchase the Coins?

One of the main questions that has been raised is whether RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement) dollars can be used to purchase the gold coins. RTGS dollars are Zimbabwe's official currency and are used for electronic transactions, but they are not widely accepted by all merchants.

According to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, the new gold coins can be purchased using any form of legal tender, including RTGS dollars. This means that Zimbabweans who have RTGS dollars can use them to buy the gold coins.

What about Zimbabwe’s 2008 Hyperinflation Currency?

Unfortunately for collectors around the world who have made the 2008 $100 Trillion Zimbabwe banknote one of the most popular numismaic collectibles of all-time, they won’t be able to help land the new gold Zimbabwe coins.

The reason is rather simple. 2008 Zimbabwean money cannot be used to buy anything, much less cold coins. In 2008-2009, Zimbabwe experienced hyperinflation, and as a result, the currency became practically worthless. In response, the Zimbabwean government abandoned the Zimbabwean dollar and adopted a multi-currency system. The primary currencies used in Zimbabwe are now the US dollar, the South African rand, and other foreign currencies. At the height of the hyperinflation, Zimbabwe released a $100 trillion dollar bill, which at its height was worth something like $1.36 USD.

Gold coins, like any other goods or services, typically require a recognized currency or a form of payment that is widely accepted. Since the 2008 Zimbabwean money is no longer in use and has no value, it cannot be used to purchase gold coins or any other items. If you're interested in buying gold coins, you would need to use a recognized currency or another form of payment accepted by the seller.

However, while officiallt the RTGS dollar can be used to purchase the coins, some experts have warned that using RTGS dollars to purchase gold coins may not be the most practical option. This is because the value of gold is constantly fluctuating, and it may be difficult for merchants to accurately determine the value of the coins in RTGS dollars.

Despite these concerns, the introduction of the new gold coins is seen as a positive step towards stabilizing Zimbabwe's economy, which has been struggling for years due to hyperinflation and a shortage of foreign currency.

The use of gold as a form of currency is not new in Zimbabwe. The country has a rich history of gold mining, and gold was once used as a medium of exchange before the introduction of paper currency.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in gold as a form of currency, with some countries, such as China and Russia, increasing their gold reserves in an effort to diversify their currencies.

The introduction of the new gold coins in Zimbabwe is therefore seen as a step towards aligning the country with this trend. It remains to be seen whether the coins will be widely adopted by Zimbabweans, but for now, they represent a glimmer of hope for a country that has been through so much economic turmoil in recent years.