holidays #30 almost done
December 2009
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Bluecross can't wait-- the blood sucking begins →
dailykos.com
As health care costs continued to rise and our members’ utilization of health care services continued to increase, we found it necessary to change the benefits structure of our Personal Choice plans to keep premiums as affordable as possible.
Read: Costs are rising, and members are using too much health care.
The two new plans, Personal Choice-Basic and Personal Choice-Value HSA will help control costs through new cost-sharing schedules and benefits maximums.
Read: You will be paying more and getting less.
Furthermore, current PPO policy holders are required to make a choice between the two new plans.
Here is a quick comparison of the existing Standard PPO plan, and the new Basic PPO plan:
Existing Personal Choice-Standard PPO
Monthly premium: Single $302./Family $770
Calendar year deductibles: Single $500./Family $1000.
Out-of-pocket expenses: Single $2000./Family $4000.
New Personal Choice-Basic PPO
Monthly premium: Single $466./Family $1202
This is a 54% increase over current PPOCalendar year deductibles: Unchanged
Out-of-pocket expenses: Single $2500./Family $5000.
This is a 25% increase over current PPO
BC/BS raised my company’s premiums 33% this November. This looks about right.
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“Get rid of a book? No way. Every one is a brick keeping the building standing. Books are my life. I leave and come back, and the books I find there tell me I’m home.”
—
Joshua Ferris (via jingc) (via mandalay)
fuck the Kindle
My brother is wise at 18.
- Bro: [catches glimpse of nipple on my tumblr dashboard] What site is that? What weird stuff are you looking at?
- Me: It's just some website. It's art!
- Bro: I could take a dump and call it art, so what.
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“Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It’s the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It’s over.”
—
Seth Godin (via azspot)
I probably buy about 25 or so books a year from stores and Amazon- for pleasure, maybe 35 or more for reference and text books, and I thought that was a lot compared to most people. people bought 300 books a year?
the goddamn Kindle will pry the book out of my cold dead hands.
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I new Avatar was some racist crap
thanks for seeing it for me and saving my money.
"There is a American kid in Afghanistan who is going to die tomorrow because Rahm Emanuel doesn’t want his boss to have to answer toughness questions from somebody like Brian Williams in a 2012 electoral debate." →
trueslant.com
(via claytoncubitt)
Also good:
Brooks is a perfect example of the kind of spineless Beltway geek we always see beating the war drum at times like these. It’s because nebbishly little dorks like Brooks and Paul Wolfowitz and David Frum got their books dumped in high school that we end up dropping daisy cutters on Afghan sheep herds and shipping working class American kids halfway around the world to get their nuts blown off. That sounds like a simplistic explanation, but anyone who doesn’t have a keen ear for the pencil-pusher’s eternal quest for macho cred is going to have a hard time understanding Washington politics. Brooks’s columns have always been the easiest way to take the pulse of that particular dynamic, and it sure seems now that bureaucratic momentum for intervention and more intervention is re-inflating the chests of these Beltway generals.
