How is this mildly infuriating
Sue the bat!
What a deal on the treatment! /s
Kahn said looking back, she should have secured private health insurance as soon as she was laid off.
“I should have done COBRA, even though it was very expensive,” Kahn said. “But yeah, hindsight is 20/20.”
The near-$21,000 burden will probably lead to fewer vacations and a delay in having central air conditioning installed at her place, Kahn said.
She said she hopes others can learn from her misstep.
“It was my fault. I took the risk of not doing COBRA and that’s forever on me,” she said. "But if one person gets covered because they saw this story, then I would be happy about that.
Our system is fucked, that is for 100% sure. There should be no way that someone goes into medical debt because they were laid off, and we should fight to have a better system.
However, viewing the problem at the societal level and the individual level are different things. Societally we need to push for health care for all. Individually though - get COBRA, get on a spouse’s plan, whatever you need to do. Don’t risk it.
The problem is that COBRA is often unimaginably expensive, and since it’s something you’re faced with while out of work, it’s an impossible option for regular people. The better choice is to get private insurance as soon as you can, but coverage is usually tied to the start of calendar months, meaning you could be uncovered for a time if you don’t take COBRA. To make it even more wonderful, you often lose access to your health care immediately when you lose your job, so COBRA is only helpful retroactively after the fact in the event of a major emergency.
Health care in the US is barbaric.
Paying literally hundreds of dollars per month as soon as I no longer have income isn’t a reasonable expectation either.
If a freak accident like this happens while I don’t have a job, I’ll just go bankrupt and likely become homeless, then die. I’m counting on that not happening.
Yea people say get COBRA, but how are you supposed to pay for that AND rent/food/utilities? On top of that, you also need to apply and fill out all the paperwork and shit while dealing with actually finding a new job at the same time.
The ol’ bat in the mouth trick gets me every time.
Cave, I go.
Crazy situation. I’d like to let her father know that those sunglasses don’t fit his face very well.
If this doesn’t teach her to shut her mouth, nothing will…
Was it piloted by Ozzy’s ghost?
Bat: “Fuck you in particular, i’m gonna send you to the hostpital”
https://www.fcgov.com/naturalareas/pdf/batarticle.pdf
Myth: Bats get tangled up in people’s hair.
Fact: Bats navigate and catch tiny insects using echolocation. This system is extremely refined and more sophisticated than radar. Bats can detect single strands of human hair and can easily avoid your hair.
And then there was Bugsy, who was kind of an idiot.
Didn’t scientists set up a high speed camera to see the amazing echolocation avoidance tactics of bats in action and actually ended up filming tons of collisions? I remember seeing that in some documentary.
Yep. Just because they are sensitive enough to detect something doesn’t mean they are agile enough to avoid it. I can see my environment just fine and I still give myself bruises walking in to tables and door frames.
Well, if so, I want to see a bloopers film with bats colliding in slow motion.
squeak squeak squeak WHACK SQUEAK SQUEAK
EDIT:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bats-crash-into-each-other-all-the-time-high-speed-cameras-reveal/
Bats Crash Into Each Other All the Time, High-Speed Cameras Reveal
The sight of bats bursting forth from caves at dusk is majestic enough to dazzle any spectator, scientist, or Gotham City billionaire orphan vigilante. Comprised of hundreds of thousands of mammalian aeronauts, these massive clouds of biomass seem to move as one organism, demonstrating the extraordinary coordination of individual bats.
Or, so it would appear to the untrained eye. High-speed video cameras, however, reveal that bats are a lot more accident-prone than they look at first glance. A new featurette from the California Academy of Sciences follows bat biologists Nickolay Hristov and Louise Allen into the field near Hill Country in central Texas, to document the twilight flights of Brazilian free-tailed bats.
YouTube video containing said slow motion collisions
“We expected that they fly around each other and they never have physical contact,” Hristov said. “We have found, shocking to us, that bats crash into each other quite often. It’s a messy situation, but generally it’s very safe and it works very well.”
Is this where they hibernate to in the winter?
Erica Kahn, now 33, had recently lost her job as a biomedical engineer when she traveled to the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in last August, she told NBC News.
After Kahn lost her job, she declined to pay for her former employer’s insurance for $650 a month through COBRA, the federal continuation of health coverage law.
The unemployed Massachusetts woman figured she could roll the dice as a healthy woman in her early 30s or at worst, could hastily buy private health insurance in a pinch, Kahn said.
I mean…you’ve the right to do that, but the flip side is that if you decide you don’t want to do insurance, you need to pay for any medical care you get.
Insurers mitigate risk. You can’t just get a condition and then go out and buy insurance to pay for it — they’ll be structured to make that difficult, or they’d just be constantly losing money.
Kahn went online, bought a policy and then went to get rabies vaccinations and treatment in Arizona, Colorado and Massachusetts, believing she was in the clear.
Then the bills started pouring in, asking for a total of $20,749, because her policy had a 30-day waiting period before she could receive treatments covered by the plan, she said.
And, yeah, there’s that structure.
Personally, I think that unless you’re truly in a position where you really don’t need risk mitigation, you probably want health insurance, since you could wind up with some kind of utterly catastrophic situation. Like, if you can reasonably cover any medical bill that comes up yourself, then yeah, it’s just taking on some unnecessary overhead. If I were Bill Gates, I wouldn’t get health insurance. But for most people, I’d at least get coverage for catastrophic events. Going with a high deductible is a more-reasonable way to reduce the amount of risk mitigation you’re buying.
All of that would make sense yeah. If the cheapest alternative wasn’t 650$ a month.
Got to say as someone from the Nordics that this shit is beyond ludicrous and honestly they’re playing Jenga with the whole of American society, begging for an armed revolution.
Which could be argued to have already started.
Edit just out of interest I checked how much would a monthly payment be on average if I were to buy a 21 000€ car. With a 7% interest rate and a five-year plan, 380-420/month.
But this lad should’ve been paying 650… just in case?
Edit2 meant to write “lady”, came out “lad” and I’m not changing it
Well that sucks.
