I became the help desk. It seemed like an elevated status but in reality it meant I got some of the drudgery piled on to me. Password changes, adding students,
disk quota increases and such.
Similar to adding the words "bad economy" in discussions regarding performance evaluations and raises. Cop outs based on mostly arbitrary "market mechanics".
The differences in the prices you mentioned are astronomical...
I'm already getting angry here to be charged $50 instead of $25 when the doctor "touches" you during some basic evaluation. But at least they tell you about any massive amounts coming up before any treatment happens.
It's not sane. With insurance, was hospitalized for a heart condition. ~$45,000. Found no problem in testing, so they kept ordering more tests, sending in more cardiologists. Kept hearing "I know you've said this several times already, but please repeat for me...". Each time I repeated the story to a different doctor there was a large bill. Clearly the hospital new how to pad the bill.
I eventually left "against doctor's advice" though there was a doctor there that agreed with me leaving. Pursued lower cost versions of remaining tests recommended on outpatient basis.
The funny part that time was there was a "patient billing advocate" in the hospital, who was magically never available over the three days I was there despite repeated efforts by us each day.
We had to pay our ~$8,000 deductible, everything above that was covered.
We paid by negotiating a one lump sum payment and got 25% off. Had a relative with more cash flow make the payment all at once then paid them in installments. Was told by a doctor later that they only get paid 75% of what they bill by the insurance company, and that considering that, the 25% discount made sense. Tried for a 30% discount but 25% was the best we could do. I pre-negotiated 25%, then had the relative with more experience in negotiating close the deal and try for 30%.
There was a substantial upside. The cardiac event happened early in the year, and everything covered by insurance for the rest of the year was 100% free. We were able to pursue some things we probably wouldn't have otherwise. Simple things like having more cough syrup on hand became a no-brainer as cost of visit and prescription was guaranteed to be $0
> We were able to pursue some things we probably wouldn't have otherwise. Simple things like having more cough syrup on hand became a no-brainer as cost of visit and prescription was guaranteed to be $0
This is one of the big upsides of always free at the point of access healthcare like we have in the UK. Although there is some inefficiency, in practice I beleive it actually lowers the total cost of healthcare as people seek treatment/diagnosis earlier and avoid getting as sick in the first place.
Someone recently pointed out here that in the UK you still have pox parties because the chickenpox vaccine is considered too expensive by NHS. So that's another way to lower costs, of course you now have a 20% possibility of getting shingles and dealing with that pain.
The weird part is that a Firebase plan for one of my side-projects suddenly auto-updated to the paid "Firebase Blaze". The email notification stated : "Your project was upgraded due to activity in Google Cloud"
"A user has set a new billing account for your project in the Google Cloud Platform console. This initiated billing for your project, resulting in an upgrade to your project's Firebase plan."
Issue with that is that I never made such a change. So how could "A user" have made this change?
The resulting frenzy in inspecting admin and user-logs ( and checking if my account was hacked ) just found a new billing entry called "Google Maps Platform Transition Account" that was suddenly linked to this Firebase project.
And I don't even seem to have permissions to inspect it.
It seems it was an unintended consequence of the Google Maps change and many users were affected and confused by it [1]. If you add a Billing account to a cloud project, Firebase will automatically upgrade you to Blaze. Since Google Maps added a billing account automatically to your Google Cloud account, that auto-upgraded your Firebase plan.
The response from the Firebase team [2] was that no additional charges would occur based on this incident, and they've opened an incident report [3] in their dashboard.
