My mom just got a prescription for a new wheelchair.
AFTER insurance, she's being charged 600. Luckily she has a second insurance that is covering that portion.
Looked up the exact model number on Amazon, it's only 250 bucks there.
The US healthcare system in a nutshell.
George W Bush will never be redeemed to me. Michelle Obama gave that man a hug and y’all have been going super hard for him ever since. when this is the same man who abandoned Black folk during Katrina, gutted education, initiated endless wars & ruined the economy.
I’ll NEVER understand how so many of y’all were hoodwinked into the belief that the government should NOT use the money you pay in taxes to create a social safety net that benefits you, fund public healthcare, lower housing costs, and make daily life more affordable.
@anishmoonka I noticed the old cartoons like Dragon Tales use slower motions, like when they reach for objects you actually watch their arm reach for it and grasp it, but modern cartoons move super fast with objects just appearing. Everyone is running and bouncing all the time now, too.
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, our entire government is a huge mafia who launders our tax payer money right back to themselves through foreign aid and endless wars.
They all hate you and could care less if you suffer and die horrible deaths, as long as they get dirty rich.
I will never understand how so many of y'all were hoodwinked into believing the government should not use the money YOU PAY IN TAXES to create a social safety net that benefits YOU.