There really seems to be a shortage of dentists. At least my dentist was doing appointments every eight months only, because of lack of capacity. Maybe that was just covid backlog? Anyway, RFK jr has a plan to free capacity in pediatric dentistry.
In 2020 and 2021, Delta Dental of MA relaxed this a bit and said that 2x a year was fine. But that, like so many things, got rolled back. Most people weren't going, then anyway. I did, and my dentist was extra careful and had giant heparin filters installed. It got tough to stick to the schedule when everybody decided they had to get dental care at the same time.
I go 4 times a year, because I have periodontal disease. On my old plan, I never paid a co-pay because the perio maintenance was considered preventive, but now I have to figure out which one is a regular cleaning and which one is perio. And it can be less than 3 months from the last one so long as there aren't more than 4 in a year. That's not the calendar year, but a rolling 365 day period. I can't remember when it mentioned that I had to move an appt a couple of days even though it had been more than 3 months from the last one, but I know it happened.
1: We just got legislation authorizing dental therapists, a mid-level provider who can manage less complex care. Basically a dental NP.
I want a dental NPC. A routine cleaning plus they can give you a side quest.
Technically ours is 2x/year. It's just that we're a a week or two short of the anniversary of last summer's appointments, so this would have been the 3rd in 12 months.
Even better, crucial NPCs can often be found in taverns.
I have eye care insurance that covers a "year" of contact lenses. When I was on two week lenses, this meant 2 boxes of 24 lenses per eye, for 48 weeks of lenses, which last time I checked didn't constitute 1 year. I would end up picking a few times a year to wear a pair of lenses for 3 weeks to fill in the gap. It was basically fine but you do notice a general decline in comfort wearing lenses too long.
Last year I switched to 1 week lenses. This came out to 2 boxes of 27 per eye, for 54 weeks of lenses. I'm not complaining about this arrangement, but I'm starting to think that 1 year to an insurer and/or lens manufacturer = whatever fits into a rectangular box.
I just met my deductible for the year, so that's exciting. Maybe I can cram in some extra surgeries.
My Medicare yearlies similarly slowly migrate through the calendar.
7: Eyemed let me place one order. So, I could order a year and get reimbursed but not submit 2 separate claims for 6-months worth of contacts.
9: If you want to stay on a once a year schedule here, you need to have no other problems and be vigilant about booking. They won't book you out a year in advance, so you have to check the earliest date that the schedule opens and call.
Follows a weekend where they did a nominally better job covering the protests and contrasting them with the parade (WaPo had a bombastic piece of garbage on the parade) but that coverage very quickly disappeared from the front of the website.
In print they had a prominent pair of demonstration/parade pictures dominating the front page* with an article contrasting the two, but the main protests-only article seemed to be one on page 20 that was headlined " Thousands(!!!???) Mobilize for 'No Kings' Demonstrations." (May have been more on local ones in NYC area).
*Also an insipid Peter Baker "analysis" I had missed which was full of Bullshit about Trump and foreign conflicts.
My kid's annual pediatrician visits have drifted forward for the same reason. It does seem like a particularly dumb side effect.
And am also noting that almost no one in the regular media seems to find it newsworthy that several Republican senators (Mike Lee and Moreno) made mocking social media posts about the Minnesota murders.
"Imagine if a Dem" is a tired trope, but holy shit, imagine if!!
My broken record, let me show it to you, but I do think it is hard to even begin to appreciate how fucked in the head almost every elite in the country is about the massively warped information space we live in. (I mean, it has led to us all being fucked in the head--as it was designed to do; so maybe don't listen to me. I don't know, but it's fuuuuccckkkked well and good.)
It's Brandolini's world, we just live in it.
Oops, 12 & 14 should be in the *O-pen* Thread. (saying it to myself like a backwoodsman saying "the *PA-VED* road.")
I'm in an anti-insurance mood currently because an ER fucked up the billing so insurance rejected and now the hospital wants $1000 and I just stuck a letter from the insurance company saying it was a coding error in the bill reply envelope. Very tempted to tell them my consulting rate for addressing other parties' errors is $500/hr.
On the plus side I'm immune to rabies for the next two years so I can go wrestle stray raccoons whenever I'm bored.
Though some people say you shouldn't try to make your hobby into a side hustle.
SP!! did moby have to get a rabies shot?
How long until RFKJr comes after rabies shots?
My guess is that stopping the rabies shot gives too many corpses too linked to the policy.
Yeah it was stupid, first night it was hot here in April I opened the windows and there was some damage to the screens but I said whatever I'll put in the window AC soon. But the next day I had itching on my back and my wife said it looked like a bite mark and we once had a bat in our house (like 20 years ago) so I went to the ER and they said probably it's just two bug bites that happened to be close to each other, but there's maybe a 1% chance it was a bat and if it was rabid you'll die so I got immunoglobulin and the rabies series.
The series is four shots*, day 1, 4, 7, 14, and the only place besides ERs that will give them are travel clinics where you have to book months in advance. I even called insurance and tried all the places they suggested and no one would give me an appointment, so I just had to go back to the ER three more times. On the last visit I guess the ER was like, he's been here on a schedule so we'll code this as a routine treatment instead of an ER visit and the insurance rejected it because they won't cover "routine care" in an ER, even though they covered the fiest three visits in full and there was no other way to get the shots.
*despite the myth spread by Diff'rent Strokes, not in your stomach, just arm, although the immunoglobulin was a fairly large needle at the site of the putative bite.
I think the technology has improved since the 80s and Diff'rent Strokes was accurate at the time.
There is a horrifying-in-every-way This American Life story about a woman who got bit by a rabid raccoon and then was nearly killed by the beaurocracy around getting rabies shots. 13 minutes of Steven King meets Orwell. Recommended.
Amen. Just to make it a bit worse, Atossa's birthday is in late June and we like to have her spend most of the summer with her grandparents in other states. (This may seem like humblebragging about having the summer to ourselves, but I swear I have a point.) So we need to schedule her doctor's appointment around her week-long stay at home in the middle of July. Either the dentist has more flexibility than that, or it basically already has crept five and a half months through the year; her appointment was last week.
There was an article in the Globe about getting billed for the Rabies immunoglobulin along with the shot. The people thought it was preventive, and they got stuck with a $6k bill. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/02/26/business/bat-house-sends-family-rabies-treatment-surprise-bill-6240/
When I had bats in my attic, I contacted my town's public health nurse to find out if there was a way to get the rabies vaccine if I got exposed without going to the ER for this reason. She thought it was free. It turns out that if you are uninsured the state of MA will cover it 100%.
I then got a call from someone at the state, asking me about my exposure and he determined that I was fine. He said, if you can get the bat sent to the state lab, and it's negative, you don't need the shots. He thought I could get the town animal control to capture it, but I know they don't do it. The public health nurse gave me helpful tips on how to catch a bat safely, but there was no way in hell that I would do anything other than shoo it a window if I saw one inside my living space. Hearing them at dusk was awful enough.
I think CVS and Walgreens do follow up rabies shots, but you do have to go to the ER for the first one. MGH used to offer it at the medical walk-in, but they closed that and you got billed as a hospital outpatient for that, not an urgent care.
I also got a bill for PT that should have been covered by either health insurance or auto insurance from a year ago.
I had bats in my attic
People say things like this about me all the time.
AIHMHB, my worst insurance story is from when I was pregnant w Pokey in 2010. Got some labwork done, insurance paid the bill.
In 2012, Heebie U switched insurance companies. A few months later I got a bill from labcorp, for about $300, for the bloodwork from 2010.
After Heebie U switched insurance companies, the old company (aetna I think?) went to labcorp and asked for their $300 back. So labcorp gave it back to them and billed me. I had the 2010 EOB and everything.
I calles aetna and they said they couldn't discuss closed accounts with me. I asked HR for help. They tried and gave up. I ended up paying it and giving up because it was giving me an ulcer.
Oh and as for the OP title the maximum cringe joke is that you had to schedule the dentist at 2:30.
Tooth-hurty.