Covid 11/10/22: Into the Background

[-]gabrielrecc3y50

Had a similar medical bill story from when I was a poor student: Medical center told me that insurance would cover an operation. They failed to mention that they were only talking about the surgeon's fee; the hospital at which they arranged the operation was out-of-network and I was stuck with 50% of the facility's costs. I explained my story to the facility. They said I still had to pay but that a payment plan would be possible, and that I could start by paying a small amount each month. I took that literally and just started paying a (very) small amount monthly. At some point they called back to tell me to formally arrange a payment plan through their online portal, which gave me options with such high interest rates that there was no way my future earnings would increase at a fast enough rate to make a payment plan make any sense whatsoever. I called back and explained this, and said that if those were the only options I guess I would just have to try to scrape the money together now, and that I was prepared to try to do this. The administrator, bless her heart, asked me to hold for awhile, and eventually came back to say "I've spoken with my colleagues, and your current balance owed to us is now zero dollars".

This (along with a few other experiences in my life) has underscored how sometimes an apparently immovable constraint can evaporate if you can manage to talk to the right person. That said, I felt very lucky to have been taken pity on in this way -- I feel like having one's balance explicitly zeroed out in this way is rare! But it's interesting to hear that Zvi knows of cases where someone just didn't pay, with no consequences. I would have assumed that they'd normally report nonpayers to credit agencies and crater their credit scores after long enough, as it costs them nothing or almost nothing to do so. Would be interested either to hear other people's anecdotes of what happened after nonpayment of a large hospital bill (positive or negative), or to see data on this if anyone knows of any.

[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley3y20

So I take an Alexander lesson nearly every week and have for something like 4 years now. I can say that the linked tweet about AT is basically right, although I think it overplays the level of conscious access you can get to what's going on. I generally describe it to people as behaviorist retraining of posture and movement: the methods of AT are nothing more than just getting you to develop new habits via dressed up clicker training, and they work really well because clicker training works really well. Your teacher stands and moves naturally, uses their hands to inform your body about what their body is doing, and your body slowly learns to copy what they're doing, all while your teacher says phrases that you come to associate with what's happening so you can just say something to yourself like "forward and up" and then your body does it.

[-]ChristianKl3y42

The Alexander Technique is old. One of the implications of that is that over time different teachers evolved different ideas and there are significant differences between teachers. The one teacher with whom I had a 5-day course said that in her teacher training they practice sitting up and sitting down for hundreds of hours. I was talking with another Alexander technique teacher and they said that didn't do the "sitting up and down"-thing that intensely.

The level of conscious access you can get with one lesson per week and the level that you can get with very intensive training are different.

If you approach it as a behaviorist exercise as you describe that's not a practice of increasing conscious access. If you want to train conscious access then it would make sense to add more of a Feldenkrais-like approach of playful discovery. In that, the teacher's job is to point your attention to what's outside of your attention.

[-]tkpwaeub3y10

Re medical bills (or any bills, for that matter):

A major change from the TCJA in 2017 was allowing more businesses, including some health care providers and third party debt collectors, to use cash accounting rather than accrual accounting for the purpose of computing taxable income. The upshot is that treatment plus a printed and mailed bill no longer counts as revenue for a lot more businesses. That's precisely what allows for the "aspirational" bills you're describing. Repealing this provision would go a long way to taming this particular aspect, I believe.

[-]Lao Mein3y10

Maybe obscuration of medical costs is a social thing? Here in China, there is a giant LED board in hospitals that lists the exact costs of various medical procedures (e.g. "Hip replacement: $1000"). But I imagine seeing hyper-expensive medical costs at every visit might be upsetting to a lot of people in the US.