11 Comments

The responses on twitter to that SNL skit are why SNL has a hard time doing funny any more. It's just a long list of "how dare you?!"s. People are so uptight. That skit was funny.

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From Topol’s latest post (https://erictopol.substack.com/p/booster-waning-long-covid-brain-fog), a paper on Paxlovid resistance: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05514-2

Please tell me this isn’t more GoF research... Not my field but it certainly reads as such:

> E166V mutation conferred the strongest resistance (~100-fold), but this mutation resulted in a loss of viral replicative fitness that was restored by compensatory changes such as L50F and T21I

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> They could, in theory, if they wanted to,

> harass you, send your debt to a collection

> agency, report you to credit agencies...

If you care about your credit score don’t follow the following advice. If your credit score isn’t important to you at the moment and you have medical (or credit card) debt *and time*, you can likely make some money this way.

Debt collection agencies are often sloppy when it comes to following laws. This means they often break collections-related laws at state or federal levels in the course of attempting to collect a debt from you. If you document this you can take them to court, judges tend to be sympathetic and you can often win the balance of your debt plus some.

It’s been years since I was interested in this, but see:

- Dealing with Debt: Beating the Bill Collectors at Their Own Game

- NOLOs Solve Your Money Troubles

There maybe be better sources now since it was like 2011-2012 that I was really interested here, but those two were helpful. The first just for context of how debt collection companies actually work, second for the federal and state laws (hopefully still contained in the recent addition). I have no affiliation with either author/publisher.

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Nov 12, 2022·edited Nov 12, 2022

"when hospitals bill you like this it is mostly aspirational.".

I'll need to look it up but there was a guest on the podcast econtalk explaining that due to legislation in the Regan Era, hospitals get a tax break for unpaid bills. So they have a direct incentive to send huge bills. Not just aspirational.

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