You wanna charge insurers @JoeBiden@WhiteHouse? Tally up the cost—say it's 100 million—then go around to the insurers like a debt collector.
"Hey, Aetna! What percent of the country you cover? 3.4%? Your bill is $3.4 mil. Blue Shield? 11% That'll be $11 mil."
THE END
This is NOT difficult, but we are stuck in damn colonizer mind.
ANY public health person knows when you do public campaigns "over there," everything gotta be free at point of service. It's simple! We did it with vaccines which was, for its challenges, pretty successful.
You can't charge. YOU CANT'CHARGE at point of service.
The US is having a hard time seeing "us over here" as like the colonized we gift charity public health to "over there." And our rulers LOATHE the idea of our populace getting used to getting anything "for free."
At least they are not singing their normal song, "Means testing...wider than a mile."
Still. They KNOW the more burdens they put up, the less tests will even get requested. Housing assistance funds were almost entirely unused! NOT FOR LACK OF NEED—but bc the forms were too complicated, the onus was on renters and landlords didn't want the funds!
Does anyone honestly believe INSURANCE COMPANIES are going to make it easy to reimbursed?
Long live @pocojump's Uncle Harold! Long live @WHarkavy! May they haunt the dreams of insurers and means testers as reliably as The Ghost of Christmas Future visits Ebenezer Scrooge every year!
Hey @WhiteHouse, when a QT from someone like me with [checks notes] 6.196 million fewer followers than you is getting more likes and RTs than your original tweet, you might wanna reasses the popularity of your proposal
Welcome new followers. I do cuss and rail against the administration’s abysmal handling of the pandemic a lot. But, I also tweet abt HIV/AIDS, Betty White, American Studies, med anthro, media analysis, Philip Glass, queer stuff, the movie Clue— and I wrote a book out this summer!
Hey @POTUS@SpeakerPelosi, they're doing it in your town. Though you're paternalistic in what is almost a colony, learn from the District. We ALL need this, YESTERDAY!
Still angry they are trying to get people to use home tests via insurance reimbursements for fuck’s sake! A home test should be used intimately and often w/o barriers! Do you know how many millions of HIV infections are stopped by condom use?!?!
Giving condoms away has been a huge part of this!! You want people to easily & freely use condoms—as many as they need—any time & anywhere they have sex! When you get condoms in dorms, prisons, bathrooms, bars do you need to pay and call Blur Shied for 80 cents? No! They’re FREE!
And for reference, condoms cost 3 cents to make and sell for about a dollar. Home Covid tests cost about 80 cents but sell for $10-$100. The gov could just give something away that cost to make what a condom sells for, to the same end — to stop the spread of infectious disease!
New one day record on this bird app for me—am glad because my anger resonated with other people's anger. We should be MORE angry at how all of this is unfolding, how we are expected to pay with our time and our lives for grotesque government neglect!!
Wait, insured Americans have to get reimbursed, but ppl on Medicare (who may be elderly, poor, disabled, homeless or all) have to order them from a “forthcoming” website? Can ppl w insurance also order the home tests?
An utter disdain for people who are illiterate or computer illiterate. Most people on Medicaid are elderly, most people affected by Covid the worst are elderly—maybe don’t make them navigate a website when you can just give them away!
They brag this is the wealthiest country of all time and the economy is booming—well, stop fucking around here then. Everyone in. No one out. Everyone gets the same thing. No sending the insured on this goose chase, making the uninsured jump through that hoop
*Medicare
Imagine waging a condom use campaign and saying “Alright, who has insurance. Tony? OK pay me now, when you get home, go blueshield.com. Al, you got no insurance? No condoms, wait to have sex until you can can order some at healthcare.gov.” No one would use them!
If you want someone to wrap their genitalia with latex…if you want someone to shove something up their nose…if you want people to widely use intimate tools at home to address infectious disease, you must give it away!”
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So many people, me included, feel beaten down and depressed. This is bc as we start year 3, we are yet again tasked w the impossible: Carry out difficult, alienating, individual tasks which are doomed to never be enough bc they require a state response that isn’t happening.
So many people feel ashamed to be depressed, like they’re a failure bc they struggle to teach online or they feel privilege guilt for mourning a 3rd birthday w/o their friends.
It’s not you. There’s little any of us can do. It’s the system. And it is ok to feel broken by it.
A friend asked me how to help donate better masks. And it’s not something we can really do beyond a bit of harm reduction. The state needs to produce and distribute masks and tests. It won’t do it, so unless we can force it to, any “charity” will be crumbs. There aren’t enough
I don’t feel like most of us have accepted how bad this is going to make life, nor how many lives it will end. The vaccines are working well at individual protection—but the scale of direct harm & collateral damage of what’s coming is almost as unfathomable as it was preventable.
Vaccines work best at a population level by making them encounter viruses so infrequently, they have fewer chances to breakthrough.
What we have is runaway community spread — like pointing a fire hose at someone wearing a water resistant jacket & expecting them to stay dry.
The good news, such as it is, is that the percent of cases leading to overall hospitalizations and death is much lower than it would have been pre-vaccine; the bad news is that sheer volume is SO MUCH HIGHER than it ever was pre-vaccine—and it's still rising.
1. Extremely proud of our journalism students at Northwestern, and the courage they have to fearlessly report on an institution which has so much power over the grades, housing, food, medical career and futures
SCOOP: Today on MSNBC, Symone Sanders interviews her former boss, VP Kamala Harris, abt the Democrats' plan to win the midterms by doing—nothing!
SCOOP: Today on Fox, former Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders interviews her former boss, former President Donald Trump!
SCOOP: Today on NBC, Jenna Bush Hager interviews the woman who took over the job last held by her mother—First Lady Michelle Obama! today.com/video/watch-mi…
I will never understand how news media can hire people who were working like YESTERDAY to spin the news media, give them the microphone, then turn around and say "Why doesn't the public trust us?"
Symone Sanders announced her departure from the White House a month ago. It is likely she was negotiating her new job at MSNBC while she was working for the people. How is that ethical? Ppl get angry at workers becoming lobbyists right after leaving govt—how is this better?
Yup. Legislators sell their govt expertise off to the highest bidding corporation after short stints in govt. It is BARELY regulated. But I don't think there is any regulation or oversight of spokes ppl leaving for lucrative talking head gigs at all.
1. Today I was supposed to meet my dear friend, who is an FDNY chaplain, for an outdoor lunch. She had to cancel at the last minute, when she rushed off to a fire.
2. My friend had found me a safe place to live when, in 2018, the radiator in my East Village walk up had exploded, spewing boiling water across ceiling, walls, floors. So much hot water scaled the ceiling before the FDNY arrived, part of the ceiling collapsed.
3. Had I been asleep when that had happened, I'd have been badly scalded or possibly killed.
It happened because may landlord didn't do a safety check before turning on the heat that winter.
My landlord was a well-known repeat offender of a landlord.