Humanity

Shots – Health News : NPR

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Surprise medical bills are the target of a new law. Here’s how it works : Shots – Health News : NPR

Patients are months away from not having to worry about most surprise medical bills — those extra costs that can amount to hundreds or thousands of dollars when people are unknowingly treated by an out-of-network doctor or hospital.

The No Surprises Act — which takes effect Jan. 1 — generally forbids insurers from dropping such bills on patients and, instead, requires health care providers and insurers to work out a deal between themselves.

Some observers have speculated that the law will have the unintended consequence of shifting costs and leading to higher insurance premiums.

Many policy experts told KHN that, in fact, the opposite may happen: It may slightly slow premium growth.

The reason, said Katie Keith, a research faculty member at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, is that a new rule released Sept. 30 by the Biden administration appears to "put a thumb on the scale" to discourage settlements at amounts higher than most insurers generally pay for in-network care.

Pray to end abortion, the road side sign says 🙏

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Pray to end abortion, the road side sign says 🙏

You sometimes see that sign nailed to telephone poles or strapped on the porches of rundown rural homesteads way out in the country. Liberals like to dismiss these folks as brain washed “fundies”, they American Taliban. But when you hear these folks talk, they are deeply held in their convictions.

While my views have evolved, I support safe and legal abortions as it’s a relatively low cost medical procedure and it can make a women’s life better by having the choice between carrying a pregnancy to term or not.

Now I don’t approve of recreational sexual activities or one night stands. The risk of sexually transmitted diseases that can have life altering consequences like HIV remains high even if many are very mitigable. I don’t like how television promotes casual sexual activities or sex for fun or reasons other than having a child. Contraception isn’t perfect.

Any society with the creation of life is going to have the destruction of life. But a child yet born is going to have none of the experiences of life, none of the colors, the smells or the tastes of life. They might have the beating of a heart but it’s the meaningless contraction of muscle cells, much like a recently slaughtered chicken might flap around after his or her head is chopped off. But those contractions are meaningless.

William L. Moore – A forgotten advocate for civil rights and mental health issues – Canadian Military History

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William L. Moore – A forgotten advocate for civil rights and mental health issues – Canadian Military History

On 23 April 2010, a memorial plaque was unveiled outside the Greater Binghamton Transportation Center bus terminal in Binghamton, New York, in honour of a mostly forgotten civil rights and mental health advocate who was murdered on that day 47 years prior.

William Lewis Moore, born in Binghamton on 28 April 1927, was a postal worker and member of the Congress of Racial Equality, who achieved a level of notoriety for staging lone protests against racial segregation in an era when few white people supported such causes.

Moore also became an advocate for mental health issues, a result of having been institutionalized for a year and a half after suffering a mental breakdown while a graduate student at John Hopkins University in the early 1950s. He would ultimately be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.

Moore staged lone protests by marching to capital cities on three separate occasions to hand-deliver letters he’d written denouncing the practice of racial segregation. His first march was to Annapolis, the state capital of Maryland, followed by a march to the White House to deliver a letter to President John F. Kennedy, on the same day that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was released from the jail in Binghamton following protests in that city.

The Brief, Baffling Life of an Accidental New York Neighborhood

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The Brief, Baffling Life of an Accidental New York Neighborhood

But how did this defunct train station end up looking like a neighborhood on Google Maps? Sisson got lucky in his search—one site specified a Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) number for Haberman, part of a system used by the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS maps had spaced neighborhood and train station names differently so they could be distinguished from one another, but somewhere along the line there had been some confusion, and Haberman was clearly listed as a populated place. Sisson speculates that a USGS employee made the simple mistake when the old maps were being digitized, and then those data got a second life then they were picked up by Google Maps’ algorithms.

You don’t own your own life, the state does 🤔

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You don’t own your own life, the state does 🤔

It is a widely understood concept that all wildlife is in the public trust, that you don’t own the wildlife even on your own land. The state owns all wildlife, they set limits on when and how much you can take. In British commonwealth counties like Canada they say all wildlife belongs to the Queen but in America, we say it’s owned by government.

It turns out that all human life also falls under the public trust doctrine. Human life belongs to the state, as only the state can own it and destroy it. Slavery is a right reserved to the government by the constitution. The government has the sole power to judge what chemicals you can ingest, whether or not to end your life or that of others, what kind of sexual acts and even abortions are lawful in the privacy of your own home or doctors office.