• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 13th, 2023

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  • I use the one that’s built in to the Fastmail service. I have a custom domain just for aliases. The Fastmail alias-creation API is integrated with the Bitwarden app (which I use) so that makes creating new accounts (that use email addresses as usernames) on websites really easy. I also use Spamgourmet which is free, convenient, and has been around a very long time. No custom domains there, but they let you use a variety of their domains and they have some short ones which is nice, but I do find that they’re blocked pretty often, mostly by major mailing list services.
















  • The AG’s press release is an infuriating read.

    [WA attorney general]Ferguson filed a lawsuit in February 2022, accusing Providence of billing and aggressively collecting money from low-income Washingtonians without determining if they qualified for financial assistance.

    Ferguson’s Consumer Protection investigation started in 2020, following complaints about collection practices at Swedish. It revealed Providence engaged in numerous practices between 2018 and 2022 that prevented patients from accessing financial assistance. Providence trained employees on aggressive and deceptive collection tactics. Their script included:

    • “Ask every patient every time” to pay outstanding medical costs;
    • “Don’t accept the first no;”
    • “If a patient declines the first request, ask for partial payment;”
    • "Use phrasing that signals to patients “payment is expected.”

    The lawsuit asserted that Providence knew many of its patients were likely eligible for financial assistance and not only failed to inform them, but also kept collecting payments from them. In fact, Providence sent thousands of patients it identified as “presumptively” qualified for financial assistance to debt collectors. Internal emails revealed Providence did this because it knew those patients were more likely to pay their bills if collection attempts continued.

    Moreover, starting in 2019, Providence sent thousands of Medicaid patients to debt collectors. Medicaid enrollees are among the lowest income Washingtonians, and are deemed eligible for financial assistance under Providence’s own policies. Providence staff caught the issue early and raised concerns to leadership. In fact, according to internal records, one employee warned: “We are sending the poor to bad debt and not treating them the same as other patients.” Providence did not correct the problem for more than two years.







  • Explosives were fascinating when I was, like, 10 years old. Now, as an adult, they’re just stupid, but we have an ever-growing population of people who derive their sense of self-worth from producing maximally loud, obnoxious, pathetic spectacles (think street-racers, coal-rollers, rap-blasters to name a few), so there you have it. When you’re a nobody and have no attributes that anyone would look up to, well, at least you can force people to pay attention to you and do it on the cheap (important because you’re poor). Boom boom pop pop.