I am going to miss a lot of you and I hope some of you will miss me for a little but we are as dust in the wind.

Thanks to Obamacare health insurers can no longer refuse to sell you health insurance nor deny coverage for your illnesses discovered in the 2-3 years before you got insurance. But you can't wait until you're super sick to buy insurance. You have to buy in during open enrollment. Here's how to pick.

A conceptual underpinning here is is both of these are true at once: 1. When a company makes a profit, the profit is owed to the shareholders 2. The company's board gets to decide whether it actually give the shareholders the profit

Uh. If I did a 15k ft view of American Protestantism, left of center Christians exist and have been here the whole time, would that be useful? I am having trouble gauging how much of the "Episcopalians! Who knew?" is sincere.

The kind of insurance policy you "pay into" for years is life insurance, specifically whole life insurance, which you shouldn't buy because it's a shitty financial product, buy term life insurance and invest what you can in the market through an IRA or 401K.

So 1. I work in insurance world as a rando individual contributor 2. It's good that we have some aggressive competition in the pharmaceutical space 3. You should be *extremely* cautious about using this service because of your insurance cost share.

Whenever I have written How-to-Health-Insurance threads on here or on Twitter, the dearly departed website, there's always a lot of complaints about how the system is bad and broken and we should just get rid of it. And here's the thing. We won't. You have to learn to navigate the system we have.

Why the hell did insurance deny my treatments, a guide to understanding the American health insurance claims system. In this thread I will explain how the claims system actually works in my experience as a former health insurance employee, what you can do about it, and when you need a lawyer.

It's open enrollment time so here's a convenient peg to hang a little tutorial about how to choose your health insurance. Most of the advice you get is bad. Most of your instincts are bad. I however used to work for a health insurance company and I do arithmetic for a living so I can help.

Back on Twitter there was a guy, probably one of the various YIMBY Jo(h)ns who I got into it with because I went on a tear about how tracking (splitting K-12 student populations into remedial, normal, and advanced classes) is Bad, Actually and he was very concerned about his children being Held Back

Also, talking about how your vote doesn't count is an act of public advocacy not vote math.

Europe is bad, actually.

Okay, I am indulging myself and recreating one of the best things I've written. Here's what happens when you join the Federation economy:

The middle-aged women who will listen to this stuff are super cringe and also the only hope we have of keeping our democracy.

To clarify, since most people probably don't know this, the $2k limit is an *asset* limit for individuals to qualify for SSI - Supplementary Social Insurance, a cash payment. There are a number of important exceptions, such as money in ABLE accounts, a home, and a single vehicle.