@GayDeceiver

I'm gonna get a self inking stamp made that says "is a pedo".

I know a teacher who orders 80 pencils each year. Sometimes her students forget to bring a pencil to class sometimes they can't afford to spend a lot on school supplies. She was audited last year, had to count the remaining pencils: show that this wasn’t wasteful spending. The school budget is, you see, very tight. And next year she’ll just get 30 pencils. Good for them, right? We wouldn’t want her wasting our tax dollars on too many pencils.

4/

@teinturs

"The closure of 'tabacs' (small local café-bars in France) contributes to the progression of far-right voting... regardless of immigration, unemployment or other economic indicators...

"Symmetrically, the opening of tabacs is associated with a decline in far-right voting, suggesting that these dynamics are not irreversible.

"No other commercial closure produces a comparable effect. The specificity of tabacs lies in their function as a place of socialisation... The effects are three times stronger in rural communities, where these establishments often constitute the last place of sociability...

"When places of sociability disappear, politics becomes a face-off between atomised individuals and national media narratives."

@redravenspirit Yes. Apparently the $300 to see the physician, (my share was $165) no longer covers going into the building to see the doctor.

The direct quote from the chat transcript is: "It is not unjustified. We bill for the facility charges that include the location the provider is working out of, the equipment, nursing and administration staff, supplies and everything else other than the actual care the physician provides."

So, to see a doctor in the Dallas area, you either have to avoid all the medical practices they now own, which is 85% of them in my little town, the other 15% are owned by another hospital chain, you will pay:

$300 to see a doctor and $300 to see the building. If you're uninsured, it's at least double that.

Meanwhile, the executive board of this "non-profit" organization are paid between 5 and 30 million dollars a year.

So, I'm going to the mat on this facilities fee thing with Baylor. $300 to see a doctor and $300 to see a building is obscene.

I've been doing research, which was not at all easy, because damn, they bury this stuff.

There was a Medicare change, and medical practices can now charge facility fees if they are part of a hospital.

How it was interpreted by money men was "buy every medical practice and put them under the hospital umbrella, and poof, double billing".

So, I tracked down the billing code and was able to drill down into the APC and CMS and find out what Medicare would pay U&C. (Usual and Customary)

I have to start with the national unadjusted APC payment: $134.00, Apply locality and wage index adjustments, which have to be looked up somewhere else, and the end result of 6 hours of research and math:

$133.47 Which is still absurd, but almost a third less absurd.