#public insurance

[appalachianfuturism]

“Policymakers in many states are scrambling to respond, primarily by loosening rules on private insurers and permitting further rate hikes by both private and public insurers. These moves are framed, by both policymakers and the media, as necessary to increase premium revenues and thereby re-stabilize private insurance markets. Consideration of reforming public insurance programs or even creating new ones, on the other hand, has tended to be written off with the argument that public insurance options can’t work because existing federal and state natural hazard insurance programs have problems. And indeed they do. Yet this narrative ignores the design flaws in these programs that set them up for problems from the start–design flaws we don’t have to replicate–and as such sets up a false equivalency that precludes creative thinking for solving an urgent and growing public policy crisis already affecting millions of people across the U.S.”

[prussianmemes]

arguing with a friend over not all zoomers abandoning normal wallets. i love my george costanza oversized dad wallet. how could you not love a pocket office...

let me hear your wisdom in notes!!!

[politijohn]

Source

[fixing-bad-posts]

[Image description: A facebook comment, edited blackout-poetry style to read, "I think you deserve free Healthcare to live."]

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I think you deserve free Healthcare to live.

[katabay]

lmao sorry to everyone in my inbox, this month has been a mess and I'm just not really around enough for it. someone in my immediate family got a new cancer diagnosis, my not-art job got restructured because management is a joke and it's been.... not great, to be honest! to top it off, my mom's cousin just died because the major hospital didn't have enough beds open for the provincial hospital to transfer him. etc etc etc.

anyway. it's been a lot and I'm Very Tired Of Things Happening 🙃

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[bitchesgetriches]

Your Yearly Free Medical Care Checklist

If you are an American who is lucky enough to have health insurance, you almost certainly have free medical care coming your way.

Several annual and semi-annual services are available to you with no copay—and you have absolutely no reason not to use them. Technically, you have already bought them, as their cost is built into the premiums you’ve already paid. And your body will thank you for it! Even if you feel perfectly healthy, establishing a baseline of health will help your medical professionals detect problems early.

Pro-tip: don’t wait until the end of the year to do all this stuff! Every medical office I’ve ever been to is slammed during November and December as everyone tries to use up their benefits. Schedule it now to avoid the crush.

Here’s what you should be doing every year.

Keep reading.

If you found this helpful, consider joining our Patreon.

[lilithism1848]

[mokutone]

your art makes me wanna start testosterone

i can't read tone well, so this is either an incredibly touching ask, or an extremely funny one, and in the absence of confirmation: both!

i'm in a chatty mood, so i'll share some thoughts about testosterone and my art.

i liked being on testosterone a lot. i had an IM injection every two weeks (on tuesdays!) and because that's a sizeable dose every 14 days that slowly disperses, it can cause some mood fluctuations (every other friday i would have a crisis about not feeling like the world had a place for me in it) but even those were far more manageable than the ones that would come with my previous and current monthly hormone cycle (every month i spend a solid week thinking the world will never have a place for me in it)

It gave me a patchy little bit of scruff on my chin and a whispy mustache under my nose that still struggles on, despite adversity!

It redistributed my fat a little bit, but that's long since gone back to pre-T shape.

it lowered my voice! that hasn't changed :^)! even if i never go back on t, that won't change. it was the thing i most wanted, and its the one i'm most grateful for. Pre-T, I didn't speak much. I'm getting better and better at talking and getting more and more comfortable communicating with people because of it.

having been off t now for 3 years, i don't pass anymore—not as a cis man, or a cis woman, certainly not as anything approximating straight. if people look at me and see anything, i'd hazard a guess that they see me as A Queer (the noun—for all it's complicated connotations).

i'm not surprised that my art might make somebody want to start testosterone! a lot of my art was made out of the aching grief that came with being kicked off of testosterone, and how neatly that loss of autonomy over my own body knits in with yamato's loss of autonomy over his own.

how my body started doing things i disliked, how i didn't have the support necessary to access the healthcare i needed—how my inability to give myself what i needed made me feel as though i were trapped inside of myself and abandoned (by both myself and the world at large)

when i write comics about yamato as a trans man, i don't take away his testosterone, because that hits a little too close to home for me. for Ninja War Town Reasons, he has plenty of access to all the HRT he could ever need and nobody questions his need for it—instead, i project my own horrors onto the way Danzō defined his identity for him as a child, the way that Kabuto and Obito dehumanize him as an adult in their war efforts, and reduce him to the thing his body holds (the Mokuton). I give him a kneejerk compulsion to dehumanize himself (out of a feeling that he has a duty to his community to do so) and I give him a slow-growing resistance to that impulse (which comes out of a feeling that the people he loves would frown upon seeing him reduce himself like that)

it's dysphoria! it's not gender dysphoria, but it's a loss of self, and a need to reclaim it. it's a war between the hollow shell of a thing he thinks he has to be, and the vibrant and messy person beneath it that he is. it's a desperate need to say "this is who i am—only i can say it"

I enjoyed HRT a lot. it was a really useful tool in helping me feel like my body was my own, that i didn't have to fight it, that we were the same entity. It's not the only tool, but it was a really good one, and one day I hope to use it again.

(as for the being off of it—it's unpleasant, but i'm enduring! being somebody who now doesn't really pass as anything has put me in a weird and interesting position, where I'm constantly having to declare myself to people, because nobody knows what to make of me on any front. they don't know if i'm a man, a woman, nonbinary, nor even what age i am (Augh!!!!) it forces me to be brave and vulnerable more than I'm comfortable with—if I tell somebody I'm a man, there's no way that they will believe I'm cis, but I'm not about to recloset myself—and I don't think I could at this point anyway.)

(there's something fascinating about the position i find myself in, and while i'd leap back on t the moment that an opportunity presented itself to do so, i do feel like i'm experiencing something interesting and important in this weird zone i find myself in)

[verved]

I'm like gradually becoming more physically disabled and am now at the point I can't work. I just can't. I'm too fatigued and dizzy and in pain and physically weak to keep going. I've been through a gamut of specialist visits, all providing no answers.

My primary care doctor has officially given up on me, basically told me to just start popping painkillers and suck it up. That this is my own fault for stopping antidepressants, when said antidepressants left me malnourished due to low appetite, and once I stopped, my physical health and motivation had a marked window of improvement. At least until whatever this is started.

I can't work like this. I can't easily apply for disability bc my pcp has turned on me and won't give me a diagnosis. He has refused further testing. I'm so tired of fighting. I'm so so tired.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Workers at Manitoba Public Insurance have “overwhelmingly” voted in favour of strike action, the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) says.

The union, which also represents the currently striking liquor workers in Manitoba, represents around 1,700 MPI employees in locations across the province, including Winnipeg, Brandon, Portage la Prairie and Dauphin.

In a release Friday, MGEU said no strike date has been set, but preparations will begin Saturday. The dispute, as with the liquor strike, is over the province’s wage increases during a time when workers across the board are faced with inflation.

MPI workers have been without a new contract since Sept. 2 of last year.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[pool-core]

[televisionenjoyer]

when phoebe bridgers sings about living by a hospital those songs are about me. I live three blocks from one hospital and seven blocks from another one

[hamartia-grander]

I'm actually so sick and fucking tired of people who think covid is comparable to the flu. Just bc you or a family member got it and didn't die doesn't mean it's not super fucking serious and life threatening, ESPECIALLY for disabled people/people with health issues/autoimmune disorders. Every time my father sees me wearing a mask he rants about how covid is just like the flu and that everyone is over reacting and [insert shitty conspiracy theory here] and it makes me so upset every goddamn time. I got covid half a year ago, despite doing everything right, thanks to my parents' stupidity. I was sick for 13 days, entirely bedridden and feverish for 9 of those days. I physically couldn't get out of bed, not even to piss, the entire first day my mother had to half carry me everywhere. Same thing the second day, when she dragged me to the doctor where I tested positive. The first five days, I couldn't even look at an electronic device and had to keep the lights off all the time bc I'd actually vomit. I had a migraine that didn't go away no matter what medicine I took, for the entire the first week. My nose was constantly stuffy and my sinuses were so backed up I couldn't breathe through my nose, which made breathing in general so difficult and painful bc my asthma was also exacerbated. So my chest hurt too. All my normal chronic pain was magnified tenfold. I had a 103 fever for three days in a row, then it fluctuated between 98-100 the rest of the time. Thinking about it right now I still remember the pain and how it felt. I've had strep throat, a lot as a kid. I've had chicken pox, and the flu several times, because my parents never fucking vaccinated us. I have never been more sick in my goddamn life than I was with covid. And this is just me. Yes I'm disabled and yes I'm still being tested for possible autoimmune disorders (my mom and her whole side of the family have them) but even still I'm not nearly as at risk as a lot of people, and I was still more affected than anyone in my entire family, who have all also gotten covid because of their own stupidity. My taste and smell were never affected, but I'm still losing hair from it, which is apparently also a symptom I never knew about.

Wear. Your fucking. Masks. Covid is still around, it's still super fucking serious, it is NOT just like the flu, and you had fucking better take it seriously. Even if you don't care about getting it yourself, at least show some goddamn consideration for others whose health and lives are at risk.

[mandana-the-service-pup]

Don’t mind me. Just sitting at the pharmacy while my doctor and insurance play phone tag 🥴

Took her gear off bc it’s going to be a while. Might as well get comfortable.

[spurgie-cousin]

the fucking audacity and privilege it must take to essentially say to women "yea I'll vote to make these procedures illegal bc I don't trust YOU guys to use them right. I, however, should be able to make my own decisions about my reproductive health" 🙃🙃🙃