Wow. You pay more than I do, for everything. Annual checkups are $0. Other visits are $25. My son's visits are $0, regardless.

I pay $0 for Tier 1 and Tier 2 drugs, and $30 for Tier 3.

For the last 28 years, I've been without health insurance just twice, totaling just a few months, the last two times I was laid off (2000, and 2001). Oh, and for a couple of weeks when I changed jobs almost 2 years ago, because I left in the middle of the month, so the insurance from my old employer lasted to the end of the month and coverage at my new one didn't start until I had been there a month.

That's pretty sad.

Here in the US, my father, who is retired and has Medicare, also had his appendix go. An ambulance was at his remote home in the country in less than half an hour after he made the phone call, and less than an hour after they got there he was in the local hospital (well, it's about 25 miles away, over backwoods roads), and he had it removed within less than 3 hours of making the phone call to 911.

It was so quick that I didn't learn about it until he called me from the hospital after he'd recovered from his surgery.

My wife has had a number of health issues over the years. One of them was thyroid cancer. Within about a week of the lump in her neck being checked by her doctor, she'd had an ultrasound, a consultation with a specialist, and she was in surgery getting it removed. And this was during Thanksgiving.

Even myself, when I had my lungs filling up with fluid, and couldn't breathe, I went to the local emergency room and I was quickly seen by a doctor and admitted into a room less than an hour after showing up.

Maybe going full socialist with medicine isn't a good idea.

Well, there is another "Dittybopper" here on Reddit, and by coincidence he also shoots muzzleloaders and was also a Morse interceptor, so I had to tack the _05H on my name to distinguish.

Yeah, I'm here now, because apparently I've been shadow-banned on the F-word. I think it was specifically one mod, and he didn't even have the guts to tell me I was banned. Just gave me a 30 day time out, and then it looked like I could post, but I couldn't. Only I could see the posts, and they "fell off" after a day or so.

And yeah, distaffbopper is kind of unique.

Here's why I use it:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/distaff

(also collective) A woman, or women considered as a group.

Meh. I look down on most people on Earth most of the time anyway.

What the others have said.

BTW, if you have no thyroid, like the distaffbopper, then you don't need to take Iodine because Iodine, radioactive or not, is only taken up by the thyroid.

In fact, after they removed her thyroid, they put her on a low Iodine diet to "starve" any remaining thyroid cells (cancerous or not) and then gave her a dose of Iodine-131. The littlebopper and I had to stay away for a couple of days, and then limit close contact with her for a week or two. We stayed with relatives over the weekend, then I slept on the couch until it was safe to sleep in the same bed.

I guess it couldn't happen now.

>rsonally, I thin aliens are already here. just not showing themselves for some reason. did you know, during the 1900s when we started making nuclear bombs ufo sightings skyrocketed? maybe they're watching us advance for some reason, or maybe feel threatened.

It was also the beginning of the Cold War.

Did you know that over half of the UFO sightings in the late 1950's through the late1960's were actually sightings of top secret reconnaissance aircraft like the U-2 and the SR-71?

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html

Rather than acknowledgeing the existence of the top-secret flights or saying nothing about them publicly, the Air Force decided to put out false cover stories, the C.I.A. study says. For instance, unusual observations that were actually spy flights were attributed to atmospheric phenomena like ice crystals and temperature inversions.

''Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.''

​

They were mostly training flights. You need to become proficient at flying such very high performance aircraft before you are trusted with an operational mission.