• 19 Posts
  • 237 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’ll have to try the cinnamon next year. I ended up sprinkling diatomaceous earth around the bottom of it and that seemed to help. But I’m not sure how often a monarch caterpillar might move to another plant so I was worried the DE may harm them too.

    Some of the plants do have aphids, but not all my plants with ants on them had aphids (at least that I could find). I know ants will sometimes carry aphids, so maybe they were scouting out new plants?


  • All very valid points and part of why American health insurance is such a joke

    I had an incident recently where my spouse had to go to the ER because of a life threatening incident. One of those fix it right now or they might die things. (They’re fine now, thank goodness.)

    We went to an in-network hospital and all doctors were also in-network. However the one who actually did the life-saving procedure was a specialist. Under our insurance plan seeing a specialist requires a referral, which of course we didn’t have time to get. So insurance tried to nope out of that doctor’s entire bill.


  • You need to know both your deductible and out of pocket maximum numbers. You’ve said your deductible is $1500. For the sake of this example let’s say your out of pocket max (OOP from now on) is $2500.

    For simplicity, we’ll go with your insurance’s negotiated rate for the procedure is $1000*. Meaning at the end of the day you and your insurance combined will pay the hospital $1000.

    Basically any bills up to $1500 for the year you pay 100%. Between $1500 and $2500 (or your OOP), insurance pays 50% and you pay 50%. Over $2500 insurance pays 100%.

    Some examples to illustrate:

    1. You’ve paid $400 this year so far. You pay the full $1000: $400 + $1000 = $1400 which is less than your deductible of $1500
    2. You’ve paid $1000 so far this year. You pay $750 and insurance pays $250: $500 gets you to the $1500 deductible limit so you have to pay all that, plus you pay 50% of the remaining $500 bill = $250.
    3. You’ve paid $1700 so far. You pay $500 and insurance pays $500. $1700 + $500 = $2200 which is less than your OOP of $2500
    4. You’ve paid $2300 so far. You pay $200 and insurance pays $800. 50% of $1000 = $500 but $500 would put you over your OOP of $2500. $2500 - $2300 = $200. You pay $200 and insurance pays the rest.
    5. You’ve paid $2500 so far. Insurance pays $1000
    • If your insurance’s negotiated rate for the procedure is $1000, this means that’s what the hospital and insurance have agreed to pay. A lot of times you’ll see the hospital “charge” a larger number and then have an insurance “discount” but ignore this. It doesn’t factor into deductible or out of pocket maximum calculations.


  • Yeah it was a weird growing season. I’ve got about 12 tomatoes between 2 plants. One plant I grabbed from the store’s cherry tomato section this spring and didn’t notice until I got home its tag said Big Boy. Since it’s about a 40 minute drive to town I decided to just plant it and hope for the best.

    I grow mine in planter boxes and usually get 55 day varieties. And I try to get the plants in about mid-May under plastic tents to get a jump start.