This is entirely unsurprising. Hopefully they can wrangle something functional out of the insurance at some point.

Also check out www.pirateship.com

In my family medicine rotation a couple months ago, we got it approved for someone with pre-diabetes, high blood pressure, and stage 2/3 kidney disease (which is not very advanced. A lot of people over the age of 35-40 can technically fall into stage 1/2.)

If they have cardiovascular disease or kidney disease, those are getting added as indications for the GLP-1’s so they might be able to resubmit the authorization/claim with those diagnosis codes added to get it covered.

In fairness to their argument, I have actually seen serious consequences from the mass theft of baby formula. When I worked in a children’s hospital, we had babies coming in with malnutrition problems because they required a special formula that was completely unavailable. The parents couldn’t buy the formula because it was out of stock at every store they were able to get to with the transportation and time available to them.

People stealing massive amounts of formula cause massive problems because the specialty formulas are hard to find to begin with, and these people are clearing out store shelves to sell it overseas.

The wealthy parents that live in nicer neighborhoods with fancier stores and fewer problems with shoplifting don’t run into this issue. It the poor families in food deserts that are most impacted by this kind of mass theft, and they’re the families least able to work around it by just going to another store to buy it.

They do feel hardship, but there are quite a few people that see donating to trump and trump merch as necessities (and not all of them are Americans).

The books on Amazon are vomited out of chat GPT. If there’s a university-curated and trained image recognition AI, that’s more likely to be reliable provided the input has been properly vetted and sanitized.

The problem with AI is that it’s garbage in, garbage out. There’s some AI generated books on Amazon now for mushroom identification and they contain some pretty serious errors. If you find a book written by an actual mycologist that has been well curated and referenced, that’s going to be an actually reliable resource.

Then you and the people that agree with you on what constitutes the beginning of human life need to be fighting tooth and nail for social services and social welfare programs to support people before, during, and after pregnancy/birth. “Life begins at conception” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” are fundamentally opposing ideals unless they are only backed by cruelty, cognitive dissonance, and hate.

If you truly believe that all life is sacred, and that life begins with conception, you need to be turning around and fighting the people beside you on the importance of supporting the humans that are outside the womb.

Adoption is not the silver bullet people seem to think it is. If the baby isn’t white, or has health problems, there’s a much higher chance they’ll end up in the foster care system.

Separately, carrying a pregnancy and giving birth are extremely dangerous. Depending on which state you look at, American women face the highest maternal death rate in the developed world. Also, the leading cause of death of pregnant women in America is intimate partner homicide, and intimate partner violence frequently escalates during pregnancy. How does adoption fix those problems?

Sometimes, there are no good options.

That’s good to hear. I always like seeing local folks doing well in their own communities more than any chain.

Sounds like some damn good reasons to go to the locally-owned restaurant and try to ensure that they get to stay in business. It always sucks when the mom-and-pop/family-owned local places go out of business because people just go to the chains all the time.

In Second Gig (the second season of the anime) they do go over her past more and it reveals that she was a little girl that survived a plane crash (?) and was one of the first children to have a fully cybernetic body. That season explores a lot about her relationship with her past and present identities, motivations, and principles. It is one of my favorite pieces of media.

Donna Noble is the best Dr. Who companion and I will not be entertaining any arguments that say otherwise.

Lt. Riza Hawkeye (Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood)

Major Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell - the 80’s movie and the anime series. Live action one needs to die in a fire)

Jo Lupo (Eureka)

Domino (Deadpool 2)

Go-go Tamago (Big Hero 6)

Mako Mori (Pacific Rim)

Golden Sparrow (Forbidden Kingdom)

Gamora and Nebula (Guardians of the Galaxy)

Evie (V for Vendetta)

Hela (Thor: Ragnarok)

Valkyrie (Thor: Ragnarok)

Molotov Girl/Millie (Free Guy)

Vaggie (Hazbin Hotel)

Cherri Bomb (Hazbin Hotel)

Carmilla Carmine (Hazbin Hotel)

Sypha Belnades (Castlevania)

Lisa Tepes (Castlevania)

Princess Mononoke

Sophie (Howl’s Moving Castle)

Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Storm, Jean Grey (X-men)

I could keep going all day. These are just the ones that come to mind without having to dig around my watched media for ideas.

I feel terrible about it, but I’ve had to limit how many of these articles I read these days. I’m in the medical field in America, and it sucked having to ration out supplies during Covid. I don’t want to think about a situation where I’d have to ration out food, water, and oxygen. I would probably fall back on mass casualty incident triage protocols…but I’d still hate myself for how many black tags there would have to be.

Nicotine is terrible for your brain and vaping is likely to have the same risk for lung cancer that smoking does, it just tends to cause a different kind of cancer. Anxiety, and any mental illness for that matter, is a hell of a burden to bear, but adding chemical dependence, health complications, and financial burden on top of it is not going to make anything better.

Recent animal and human tissue studies have shown that vaping is just as likely to cause lung cancer as smoking does, it just has a predilection for a different type of lung cancer.

All things considered, their situation is not as bad as it could be. I had a job where one of my duties was to get prior authorizations for every procedure we did in an oncology-focused plastic surgery clinic. The vast majority of the procedures were breast reconstruction following mastectomy and skin cancer excisions. I had an insurance company demand documentation and evidence of medical need to close the incision site after excising the melanoma. They were gracious enough to allow the excision without requiring a prior authorization, but in order for the surgeon to close that incision (or in this particular case, fill in the area with a skin graft because the amount of skin to be removed precluded a simple closure), we had to file a mountain of paperwork on a tight deadline because the procedure couldn’t wait more than a week or so.

I’ve also worked in hospitals, and every hospital I’ve worked in has social workers on staff to help patients line up emergency insurance coverage or financial assistance for emergency medical care. I never actually saw the bills for it, but we treated a kiddo that was a bystander in a drive-by shooting that was transferred to our hospital from another ER so that they could have the pediatric trauma surgeons try to fix his femur. So that’s two top-level ER visits, an ambulance ride, an ICU stay, and probably a bunch of surgeries and associated hospitalizations…because this 2 year old got hit in the leg with a stray bullet. The total almost certainly topped 7 digits. Shit’s fucked, yo.