Indeed. The first week of my freshman year in college I had an emergency appendectomy. I was in the hospital seven days. The ENTIRE bill, doctor, operation and room&board was $750.50. I still had three weeks eligibility on my BCBS insurance from where I worked. BCBS paid every penny.

Today, that same operation, doctor and hospital would have costs that range across the US from $9,884 to $18,585 and with some going to $40K, $50K and one costing $180K, and the insurance would probably pay only 80% or so, depending on your deductible and/or your maximum out of pocket, which is $10K for most medicare supplement plans.

IF anything, medicare and health insurance in general, has morphed into being a direct pipeline into the tax payer's wallet, without a corresponding benefit. When one is paying 5% of their income for medicare premiums only for the privileged of paying more if you require medical treatment, I'd rather pay that to taxes and eliminate the insurance middlemen who are sucking the blood out of the system.

Before Halderman walked into Tricky Dick's office and told him about the HMO medical plan, it was common for everyone to be in the same insurance pool, much like the life insurance pools that used to use an amortization table. The total costs for health treatment for the previous year were divided by the total number of policy owners and 8 -10% was added for business costs and profit. That was EVERYONE'S premium, regardless of age or health condition. And it was fair.

Let's outlaw health insurance companies and make the entire US population the "health table". Divide the total national health costs, including vision, hearing and dental, by the total population and that quotient is everyone's annual health insurance premium, paid to the US gov as part of one's taxes. Let the people vote on which special services, like gender reassignment, cosmetic surgery, etc., should be funded. Instead of paying hundreds of billions to corporations and their millionaire CEO's, lets put that money to work returning people back to health.

Better yet: private insurers are limited to earn a profit as a certain percentage of what they SAVE the insured.

For most of my life I was a runner. The last year of work, before I retired, I rode a bike to and from work regardless of the weather. Nine years after I retired I experienced Tachycardia. I had no other symptoms. My doctor took an EKG, prescribed Bistolic, and sent me to a cardiologist. He used the EGK my doctor took, because Bistolic restored normal rhythm and stopped the Tachycardia. He put me on a beta blocker and blood thinner. The insurance refused to pay the cardiologist, citing a CMS rule that the because the cardiologist didn't take the EKG before prescribing the medicine they didn't have to pay him for the service. I browsed the CMS database archives and noticed that for the specific month of my Tachycardia treatment, the cardiologist didn't have to take the EKG in order to prescribe the medicine. My insurer had to comply with the CMS rules as they applied during that month, and not when the claims were submitted, and paid what they were obligated to pay.

As life turned out, after a few months I stopped taking the medicine because of side effects. About a year later I had another bout of Tachycardia and this time the EKG showed I also had AFIB, which was asymptomatic. Another beta-blocker stopped the Tachycardia and I continue to show NO other symptoms, but I now have persistent AFIB (an irregularly irregular heartbeat) and a blood thinner is a must. But, I recently turned 80 and other than AFIB I am in good health. My wife has had two open heart surgeries to repair a mitral valve. The second one, which she was given only a 10% chance of surviving, was in 2014 and so far the pig valve is working fine. Her EKG is normal.

predicting that Musk will simply ignore Bozo's court actions and will continue to work on his Starship with his own money. His primary objective is, after all, Mars, not the Moon.

Bozo, who hasn't even put anything into orbit or carried people to the ISS, deludes himself into believing he can land on the Moon cheaper than Musk by using a copy of the ancient Lunar Lander. All he has done is repeat the same suborbital flight 15 times with no one aboard, and once with him and his friends. Not much preparation for a trip to the Moon.

"for" or "to"?

Exploiting his workers for humanity? Not paying corporate income taxes for 20 years after his startup, while making himself a millionaire, then a billionaire, and doing all of this by outdoing Walmart by being a front man for Chinese goods?

How would you know the person you replied to was living in his parent's basement and eating pizza rolls? Are you clairvoyant, or just a common stalker?

The "Squad" only accounts for a few of the 95 Congress persons and the one Senator who openly admit that they prefer Marxism/Communism/Socialism/whatever over our Republic and its rule of law under the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

https://progressives.house.gov...

Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are equally outspoken and just as crazy as Bernie.

I'm reading that book right now. Well written. So far, a good read.

Exactly a year earlier the CDC posted this: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/arti...

Based on its analysis of 73 years of published papers the CDC chose the 10 best RCT to represent their conclusions regarding the use of masks:

"In our systematic review, we identified 10 RCTs that reported estimates of the effectiveness of face masks in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infections in the community from literature published during 1946–July 27, 2018. In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks..."

That's 73 years of research. About the same time Fauci was interviewed on 60 minutes by another MD and said the same thing. He also said that people who are asymptomatic are not super spreaders.

Within two both the CDC and Fauci flipped their positions without the appearance of any peer-reviewed RCT studies that could negate 73 years of research. The reversal was politically motivated.

The CDC also has a data page which shows that in the entire country, between Jan of 2020 and July 21, 2021, the total number of children in the 0-17yrs age bracket who died of covid was 337, probably due to pre-existing medical conditions. During that same period of time 50,488 kids died of all causes. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/...

The immune system of children are much more responsive than those of adults, and while the leaders have been hand wringing and imposing economic and freedom restricting mandates, which are personally ignored by many of them, herd immunity has taken place among the children. Yet medical professionals who held to the previous understandings of the effectiveness of masks now are requesting that kids wear masks at school, even if they were "fully vaccinated". A tacit admission that the vaccine doesn't really work.

We aren't the first generation to experience a pandemic. When I was a JR in HS in 1957-58 we had a flu pandemic that killed the equivalent of 232,000 people. We didn't put people out of work by shutting down factories, closing businesses, grounding planes and stopping trains and buses, and restricting people to their homes. If one was sick they went to the doctor or the hospital, otherwise they went to school or work. That pandemic passed, as this one will too, and something will come along later to take its place.

By re-mandating masks it appears that the real objective is to complete the task of destroying the economy begun by the previous mandates, making Americans totally dependent on the government. Cloward-Pevins by the back door.

"dispel" has now become just a code word for censorship

Renowned physicist Richard Feynman wrote "I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned".

In "working with" those who would punish others for not marching in lock-step with the current "truth" (as defined by the punishers) the White House has thrown the 1st Amendment under the bus and has become an enemy of the Bill of Rights. There are five other freedoms given by God in the 1st Amendment besides the freedom of speech:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an (1) establishment of religion, or (2) prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or (3) abridging the freedom of speech, or (4) of the press; or the (5) right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to (6) petition the government for a redress of grievances."

If current events are any indicator, all of the 1st Amendment has been tossed under the bus and run over several times. AntiFa, which has changed their shirts from brown to black, have been violently attacking, and sometimes killing, those who disagrees with them, all with impunity and even the encouragement of WOKE city administrators. WOKE prosecutors prosecute AntiFa's victims for resisting the AntiFa attacks and failing to convict the victims they use taxpayer's money to repeatedly harass the victims with petty legal actions. WOKE city and state office holders forbid citizens from attending sporting events, dining in private rooms, visiting hair salons and many other activities all while they and their children enjoy such things without masks or social distancing, The "media" has become the WOKE lapdog of a single political party.

There is no need to go on. Everyone has witnessed these events live or via videos from various sources, all while watching our Republic crumble before their very eyes. The effective end to our Republic occurred when the top commanders of our armed forces demonstrated their WOKENESS by mandating the end of our military's fighting effectiveness. Whereas the NSA, CIA, DHS and other spook agencies used to spy on America's enemies, they now spy on Americans. Even the USPS has gotten into the act by trolling the social websites looking for anti-WOKE people.

By the way, at the risk of stating the obvious, defeating those who would spy on our text messages is trivial. Just sent them encrypted and decrypt them using keys established beforehand during a face to face contact. What's that you say? You have nothing to hide? In a police state that is not up to YOU to determine. Wrong Think will be severely punished.

I just came from bitcoin's website. I did not see any such notice you claim is there, AND, I downloaded the paper. Their server (IP 138.68.248.245) is in the DigitalOcean cloud, based in New York. Apparently bitcoin is not bound by UK law.

At least we have air conditioning. The folks in 1911 didn't:

https://www.newenglandhistoric...

23 cm tall and 15 cm wide?

I'm 6' 6" and out of curiosity I measured my head dimensions. My head is about 21-22 cm tall and 14 cm wide. Subtract 1 cm from both for skin thickness and my head is still fairly close to the size of that "giant".

I suspect that the measurements given in the article are misquoted.