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Australia also called them pickles.

Often this is done with rationing the care by wait lists.

In the United States it is (mostly) rationed by price.

You explained this very well though I will point out, the pharmacy actually takes a loss on a very large portion, if not a majority, of good rx claims.

Is this why the Ying Yang Twins fell off?

Outside the USA "pickle" can refer to anything that is pickled, not just cucumbers. In India for example there are hundreds of varieties of pickles (and they are all delicious).

AU calls them pickles too

20% error rate on claim processing:

https://www.carecloud.com/continuum/health-insurance-claim-errors-waste-17-billion-annually/

Aetna admits they never looked at some patients medical records before marking the claims denied:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/26/health/aetna-settlement-california-investigation/index.html

I have visited the Colosseum twice. Remember these places were built with slave labor originally. The tour guides say that during wars and the dark ages, there was no money. People were poor. The country was poor at times. They used the Colosseum as shelter and stole various metals from the structure. During times of prosperity, restoration efforts have been made including modern times. It’s expensive and time consuming. But the restoration is progressing.

"Just called" implies that the thing you want to call them is shorter or simpler somehow. "Pickled cucumber" is definitely more cumbersome to say than just "pickle". And a pickle is understood to be specifically a pickled cucumber. It's common enough that we decided it should have its own name compared to other pickled foods.

They are in some places, or they have a different term altogether.

But in the US (and Canada) where it's called a "pickle" it's largely because that's the most common pickled food that people eat. Pickled herring is basically the only other thing I can think of, and that's super regional and still nowhere near as popular.

So we just shorted it to "pickles." Just like how a "roast" or "roast dinner" usually means roast beef.

It’s really just in the United States and Canada that pickled cucumbers are called pickles. And that’s just because they were such a staple in those two countries. One reason pickling cucumbers was so popular is that cucumbers don’t keep in a cool cellar or in dried form like some other vegetables.

You might have something on that nth claim thing, because I had a bunch of other bills from that same event and they were all covered, even ones from the same doctor, but for whatever reason this one was denied.

End to end encryption is a way of making sure only the intended recipient of a message can read the message, even if that message has to be passed between many different places to reach where it’s going. This is necessary to protect your data on the internet because every bit of communication that happens, from loading websites to posting on social media to filling out online forms, all happens through the public medium of the internet.

If you’re curious how it actually works, imagine you’re sitting in school and you want to pass a note to your friend three seats away. You don’t want anyone in between to read the note, so before class you agreed on a special algorithm to use to scramble and unscramble the messages. Before you send a message, you’ll scramble it, and when you receive a message, you’ll unscramble it.

This works for a while, but eventually you realize: if anyone ever figures out your secret algorithm, they’ll be able to read all your messages. So, you come up with an even better algorithm. This one takes a password, and combines it with your message as it scrambles it such that anyone who gets the message also needs the password to unscramble it. Then you simply agree on a different password to use every day before class.

This works for a while, but eventually, it’s getting to gossip season and people are really trying to steal your messages and find out your juicy secrets. You decide that it’s too dangerous to share passwords before class because someone might overhear. So, you come up with an even crazier algorithm. This one requires two different passwords, one to scramble and one to unscramble. When you want to send a message, you now have to first pass a note to your friend saying you’d like to send a message. Then, they will come up with a scramble password and an unscramble password. They reply to you with the scrambling password. You then use the scrambling password to scramble your real message and you send it back to your friend. Finally, they use their unscrambling password to unscramble the message. This system is perfectly secure because you need the unscrambling password to read the message, and that password is never shared with anyone, so only your friend knows it.

Lol! I always choke when I whisper too loud. I could never

The whole USA system is designed to make it hard and charge you more, that's why we need to discard it and start over with another country's model as the goal.

They've found numerous insurance companies that had the policy of "reject every [nth] claim" such as "toss every 5th claim" so you get a rejection and either pay it or go complain, and if you complain, they'll usually pay it, but it is just to hassle you. And hospitals *LOVE* to have an out-of-network doctor visit and charge everybody huge rates the insurance doesn't cover. Its so bad they're making it illegal. There is nothing to fix, it needs to be replaced.

And worse, Christian hospital chains are buying up as many hospitals as they can get so they can deny abortions and contraception and anything they feel like.

Same with the Colosseum… it was considered a holy site because of the Christian martyrs that died there, sparing it from being completely pilfered and destroyed.

They are in some parts of the world.

But, presumably wherever you live, they don't simply by convention.

It would be one thing if the current system actually worked well. But it's fucking horrible. I'm disputing a charge right now.

Insurance is saying the doctor needed prior authorization. My wife is actively having a heart attack in the ER on vacation at Disney world with my 2 kids. The insurance company couldn't even pronounce the name of the procedure that needed authorization. Like I'm not going to know that, I don't know if the Dr knows that, and it's against the law to deny me coverage for prior authorization in an emergency.. but they still did it.

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Yep this^ if anyone is interested, look up sticky ceiling in the medical industry. It is an economic theory explaining part of why cost is so high.

Edit: as I was searching for a link it seems that “sticky ceiling” was a term coined by NPR to refer to “price stickiness” that was tending toward highest prices in the medical field.

>By your definition, to not be a "gun nut," one should want guns banned outright.

Point to where I said "in order to not be a gun nut, one should want to ban guns outright."

Bet you can't. It'd be an awfully hypocritical thing to say, since I own guns myself.

>Several gun nuts have outright refused to even consider this question.

The streak continues.

>Can you tell me I'm wrong?

You still haven't answered my last question.

A major advantage of Universal Health is that the they can use their size to reduce the cost of medicine, sometimes by several orders of magnitude

just thinking about trying to do that makes me want to gag a bit ngl. 😂

> That presumes that I'm talking to a rational person

You are, and because I'm so rational, I'm concluding that you're not actually interested in having a conversation, but instead punching down. This is evidenced by, among other things, your use of "shockingly" in your next sentence -- and your over-broad definition of "gun nut."

By your definition, to not be a "gun nut," one should want guns banned outright. That'd make a lot more people "gun nuts" than are actually warranted.

Now that I've actually had a chance to briefly experience you, I'm not actually sure I want to have a discussion with you if this is the kind of person you are, and how you interact with people.

Can you tell me I'm wrong?