Oznog99

I have a typewritten set of lyrics to Albuquerque. Can I get a picture with you?

Come on, do you have any idea how hard it is to FIND a typewriter??

I'm in the USA... can confirm. Unless you're upper-class or have some sort of assistance, everything you save for- house, car, retirement- can be blown away by a single medical visit, even if it's not a real problem.

For example, say you get alarming stomach cramps and go to the ER out of concern... just to get it "checked out". Even without an ambulance ride, this could easily be $8000... $10,000... more..., even if it turns out to be nothing. Even with insurance it can be thousands. For a person working at Wal-Mart, this could literally take years to pay off. The amount a person pays here WITH insurance is much much more than in the UK, and the doctor-patient relationship is freakishly compromised by management's objective to bill for more and more stuff.

EDIT for more info: What is even HARDER to explain to foreigners is that the pricing is RADICALLY DIFFERENT for insurance, esp at the ER. The insurance company has negotiated rates and a team to fight illegitimate billing. You walk in, you may get a bill 3x-4x or more than an insurance company would pay. You can actually negotiate, in some cases "yeah it's a $8000 bill but look I can pay $2000 or maybe I'll just forget about it and let it ruin my credit... you wanna deal?"

Illegitimate billing? Oh yes. For example, common scam, you have a blood test. You're billed for the blood test. The test says "low blood sugar", and does not require a complicated specialist interpretation. It'll say that right on the result... a count, a threshold, and a conclusive "LOW" declaration in another column. Then the hospital's specialist wanders by- literally- in addition to the doctor handling your case, says "my professional evaluation is you have LOW BLOOD SUGAR" and circles it in red, and adds his "professional evaluation fee" to the bill, which may be hundreds. He does rounds and does this for every single patient he can get to. Well but that result didn't NEED his consultation in this case, his interpretation was redundant, it was useless.

The hospital does not care much. An insurance company will say "nice try LOL no" and send a form letter rejecting the bill. They do this all day. YOU, as a private citizen, have no advocate who understands this system. You may be the RARE individual who understands and can identify this, call them up and say "this is not legitimate... for this reason" and may get no response, and the bill goes into collections. Protesting a bill from as a patient is a weak, shaky position to work from unless you hire a lawyer to prevent the bill from being recognized by a collection agency. Seriously.

McCarthy has since clarified/"backed off" and now says she was never against vaccination, only that vaccines should be spaced out and not given all at once. But she also asserted parents should be in charge of these decisions, which once again means that she's saying state requirements aren't legitimate, and parents with no medical training would be deciding if and when their kids would get vaccinated (usually on the advice of a nutbag).

It's been fairly clear that her son never had autism, but the similar-presentation, but treatable Landau–Kleffner syndrome. McCarthy still insists that her son had autism (now cured).

Please include a banana. For scale.

I'm gonna sell realistic-measuring tapes that are only like half the normal length per inch.

Do you think Colorado will ever ban all-caps laws?