I'm gonna share something kinda personal, because I think it illustrates a very important point, one that's often overlooked by the average healthy person. As many of you are aware, I have a fairly advanced case of multiple sclerosis - I was diagnosed over 20 years ago but have probably had it since the very earliest days of college. It's one of these diseases that's expensive to manage even /with/ good insurance, because the copays and drug costs are so onerous. But there's expensive, and then there's unbelievably, ridiculously, jaw-droppingly costly - which is the only way to describe the price of my biannual infusions. Twice a year, for six hours, I sit in a comfortable recliner while medication is slow-dripped into my veins. If I'd had to guess the cost of these sessions, I probably would have thought they cost $5000 or so. That is, until I got a bill for my portion of the latest treatment, the amount that insurance declined to pay: it was for $10,000. And that was just the shortfall, the difference between what the procedure was billed at and what insurance was willing to contribute. As you can see in the screenshot, each of these six-hour sessions "retail" for well over one hundred thousand dollars. It's difficult to comprehend how anyone could even come close to affording this therapy on their own, with the out-of-pocket sum alone being the equivalent of several months salary for many folks. The US is the wealthiest country in the world, but many of us are not wealthy, and when people say that our healthcare system is broken, this is often what they mean. We need to figure out a better way to do things, to follow the lead of many other developed nations who've realized that medical care should be affordable and attainable for everyone. Instead, our politicians are slashing benefits for the struggling so that the already-wealthy can enjoy even larger tax breaks. It's not right.

Been trying to keep the political discourse here to a minimum, but it's worth a bit of friction to weigh in on the latest targeted campaign of institutional dominance being pursued by the Trump administration, which is as needlessly cruel as it is blindly self-sabotaging. nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/po… As if it weren't already an enormous overreach to extort colleges and universities into kissing the ring and sacrificing their independence, team Trump has started targeting students in an effort to pressure their institutions into capitulation. Specifically, the ban on foreign enrollment is said to be retroactive, meaning that students already enrolled at Harvard either need to quickly transfer to other schools or face deportation thanks to nominal violations of their student visa terms. In other words, Trump and company are weaponizing Harvard's sense of obligation to protect its students by threatening enormous life and academic disruption unless the university capitulates to its demands. Like so many other policies and actions taken by this bellicose administration, first and second order collateral damage to both the targets and the country as a whole are completely ignored in pursuit of a perceived win. A "win" that requires deep, long-term loss for the rest of us.