We're in the same place, but I don't think the paperwork has been bad yet. There's no insurance involved. They do the work in their van and pass the savings on to you.
I can't tell if you're awake yet or not.
The office is actually above the nicer Starbucks. Anyway, we had to cancel the first appointment because covid.
I also hate the stupid tax break games that are a hallmark of neoliberalism. If you find out your kid needs braces before but close enough to open enrollment that you can put it off until the following calendar year, then you can set aside money in an FSA to pay for the braces out of pre-tax income. But if you try to guess ahead of time and guess wrong you lose the money, unless you can convince the orthodontist to pre-bill you. What incentive exactly is that supposed to create?
FSAs are so insane and stupid. HSAs are great (except for the weird exception around prescription drugs put into the ACA for stupid accounting reasons), but limited to only certain kinds of plans out of some weird self-contradictary "free market" ideology.
7: Don't you have a high deductible plan where they give you so much money that you can fund an HSA for the full deductible. HSAs and high deductible plans are evil, but you avoid the crazy FSA guesswork.
I have a lot of uncovered health expenses, so I can usually take the max FSA amount and not lose the money.
I max HSA but for braces and other specific things you can contribute to a limited purpose FSA on top of the HSA and save your marginal tax rate on the contribution. Same use or lose and open enrollment rules apply. It's just more paperwork and crap to keep track of.
7 and 8: This is a political thing I think about a lot. In the grand scheme of things, not having pre-existing conditions in plans and extending coverage to lower income folks is the most important thing. But why can't we have a platform where we say something like - Improved Medicare for All is just going to work pretty seamlessly and you won't have to worry about whether the providers are out of network or something turns out not to be covered after the fact. It will just be there and you can get on with your life. Same thing with elder care. We will charge you a percentage of your income, but you will not have to restructure your estate years in advance in order to avoid being poor. It will just be there. I'm sure that there are other areas of life where in a civilized world the default do-nothing option is good enough.
Although I've never actually spent anything from my HSA because I just treat it like another retirement account. Even though we have a "high deductible" HSA compatible insurance, our annual OOP max is only about $4k so makes more sense to spend regular money on that and treat the HSA like an IRA.
13: Because a non-trivial subset of the elderly want young people to suffer.
I feel like every time I tried to do something to avoid taxes, it didn't help. So I stopped trying.
14: That's also why it's a scam. It allows upper income people to save more for retirement tax free.
15: elderly people also get scammed by financial institutions.
Except when the fake wine guy robbed the one cock brother.
The weird thing is "high deductible" in HDHP doesn't actually have to be that high, it's $1,400 for an individual or $2,800. My HDHP used to be amazing in that literally my employer put the full amount of the deductible into my HSA every year, so even if I spent the whole deductible I could do that fully out of the HSA. Things have gotten worse, as they always do, now it's $3400 deductible for a family plan and they put in $2800, so in principal I'm on the hook for $600.
It's like $100 when I go see my doctor. I think because he's out of network. The insurance company people really want me to switch to their program for managing high blood pressure, but I really don't to the insurance company that involved in my life.
I just want them to give me a new hip or two.
Tell them every time they contact you it makes your blood pressure rise.
I remember being so irritated and puzzled that my mom insisted on my getting braces. So expensive and unnecessary! Of course, I didn't have the strength of character to really take a stand.
We told him he could tell the orthodontist to fuck off, but he wants them.
I felt very ambivalent about it for Hawaii. The orthodontist kept making it sound like the most important thing was the cosmetic issue, and it was impossible to tell if he was saying so because he thought it would be more compelling to us, or because there wasn't actually much of a medical need for it. But then I feel I remember hearing that there's not much need for most people to have braces besides the cosmetic standard? Ultimately I figured that grown up Hawaii would sorely want it to have occurred back when she was the age that makes it easiest socially to have braces.
26: Yeah, I don't know how I feel about it now. Given my social awkwardness, it's possible that it was only having a nice smile that prevented me from becoming an incel.
Have just gone through a year+ of adult braces. It was somewhat interesting and a lot annoying. Work was e in support of getting a bridge for my two top incisors, they pulled one lower tooth and rejiggered the rest for what seemed an inordinately long time for a 68-year old man. No insurance so no forms, but $$$ (more so for the bridge and other periodontal work than the braces actually). All started April 2020 when the always kinda loose front teeth became very loose. Have not eaten an apple since then.
My front teeth have never met correctly. I have trouble with an apple unless I slice it with a knife.
Or get the kind that comes smushed in a pouch.
Steady has teeth like a scrambled up shark mouth. He's definitely gonna need braces.
My wife and I both had braces (my wife inherited a small jaw from one parent and large teeth from another parent... difficult combination). Our kid, so far, seems not to be on track for that, which if true is some strange miracle of averaging.
I lately am noticing that it's browner in the middle of my top front teeth and I don't know how vain I am about fixing it. I can't shake the feeling that whitening must weaken your teeth, and I'm never going to quit coffee again, now that I've happily resumed.
Yeah. Teeth whitening for me would be pointless.
FSAs are okay in the specific scenario where you have regular, predictable eligible expenses like childcare. Then you don't risk losing it. But otherwise, yes, it's a ridiculous game where "use it or lose it" creates risk of loss balancing out the tax-break benefit, with people not sufficiently warned of this risk; it probably enriches benefit management companies more than it helps most people. It should really be limited to the regular-expense circumstances so it's not a "haha, you were fully informed this might happened, suck it" scam.
Who keeps the lost balance, the employer or the benefit management company or the government? If it's the management company that makes some really perverse incentives about denying / slow walking claims.
Google tells me it's usually the employer.
But I'm not above doing a Joe Rogan rant getting super pissed off about something then saying oh that's probably not what actually happened.
Even if it's the employer, the benefits manager could be in a good position to skim it off via their contract.
6: Unsurprisingly, this is where our kids went as well. Kai developed an extremely expensive post-appointment smoothie habit.
That's why I wanted to try the guy in the van.
I think we need a Stamp Act. You want your contract to be enforceable (and at least 1 party is a corporation)? It has to be recorded with some agency, with a cost per word (with the cost something like $=.001(words)^1.4 ). Same for 'forms' that have to be filled out, although I am less sure how to make that enforceable.
I think we need a Stamp Act. You want your contract to be enforceable (and at least 1 party is a corporation)? It has to be recorded with some agency, with a cost per word (with the cost something like $=.001(words)^1.4 ). Same for 'forms' that have to be filled out, although I am less sure how to make that enforceable.
26: I didn't get braces until college. It would have been better as a kid - one is awkward at 11 anyway - and the braces would have been more successful. As it is I have crooked lower teeth that I thought wasn't too bad until a) Zoom meant I stared at my face more and b) Pebbles' best friend excitedly asked if I had a loose lower tooth like her. ("Then why is it like that?")
"Because I didn't mind my own business when I was your age."
The metal band on my braces broke, about a year in, right before moving (and therefore necessarily switching orthodontists) while I was in India *and*I lost my retainer, and I spent five weeks with a wire poking into my lip and all the bottom work being undone. When the dust finally settled and we saw someone to cut off the wire I asked them to just remove everything and end the whole process, and my Mom was too exhausted and broke to argue. They had fixed the absolute worst of the fang-like appearance of my canines and I just had incredibly crooked teeth, so I was like fuck it, good enough.
The disadvantages of having not stuck with it: they're crazy crooked and stained and it is, in fact, a little ugly, especially since most people my age have straight teeth---- there's just no getting around it; flossing is a pain and I'm not good at it and my gums are always in bad shape; top and bottom are not super well aligned and I do get mild jaw pain sometimes which I suspect is getting worse over time. I don't really regret it or wish my parents had pushed me to stick with it given the givens --- it would have been a tremendous stressful pain for my mom to manage in the new neighborhood with the new finances and new living arrangements. But had our lives been better set up for it, I think it would have been a good investment in future dental health and mildly better self esteem.
"Kai developed an extremely expensive post-appointment smoothie habit."
My kid made me take him out for lunch after every one of his therapy appointments. It's the only way we survived.
There's a really good Chinese restaurant near the orthodontist, but the Italian restaurant was torn down and replaced with charitable Jewish housing.
That is, the housing is provided by charitable Jewish people. Or, if it works like Catholicism, uncharitable ones that got guilt-tripped.
I was a kid who was probably a lot like Hawaii, and my teeth were OK but the dentist and orthodontist suggested braces. It seemed like kind of a coin toss on any functional benefit, but I wanted PERFECT teeth. The process was supposed to take 12-18 months and ended up taking three years (!!!) despite my highly compliant behavior. I would definitely have been slightly resentful later about not having had the opportunity, and I still wear retainers most nights and get compliments from dentists about the aesthetics.
My sister made the opposite decision under similar circumstances, so her teeth are a little crooked, not very noticeably so, and I assume she's happy with her choice not to suffer for vanity.
Hawaii was extremely worried whether she'd be the kind of kid who looks good with braces or not, and I'm pleased to report that she thinks she looks BETTER with them. She's very sore though.
OT: If anyone is thinking of moving to Pittsburgh, you should have a look at a typical three-bedroom home for sale.
54: My goodness.
I am very curious about the sellers/decorators. And also about the vast discrepancy between the "Zestimate" and the listed price.
55: I wanted to see how Redfin priced it, but it hasn't gone up there yet.
In my town Zillow just shows things going up in price uniformly, but Redfin (which generally prices houses higher) says that some things which sold in the fall are now worth less than what people paid for them.
Moby, I think you owe it to the blog to go to an open house if they have one.
I like the wallpaper with the faces, in one of the bathrooms.
I talked to the listing agent. The faces aren't in the wall paper. They just appear when you take a photo in that room.
And the wet butt picture is actually a screen displaying a gif of a moving wet butt.
As a British person, I have very irregular teeth. When I was a kid, there weren't many kids who had braces, and it was _very_ skewed towards girls, presumably because dentists and parents thought that regular teeth as an aesthetic thing coded female.
I assume that has changed, although I don't know enough people with kids in the right age demographic to know if braces are more common now than they were then. xelA has pretty regular teeth right now, although he shows some signs of mild fluorosis which is something I also have despite, afaik, neither of us having been exposed to high levels of flouride.
I had them and it trained me to avoid smiling so as not to flash all the horrible metalwork.
Also although I am sure it was good for my teeth I DIDN'T ASK.
My father offered me the option of not getting braces for my horribly screwed up teeth. In a bit of wisdom far beyond my years, I opted to get them. Knowing my 12-year-old self, I'm a bit amazed that I made the right call.
I never got braces or had the option to. I have one tooth slightly crooked but I don't know if it was too minor to deal with or my parents just never looked into it. I don't really recall going to the dentist at all for the latter half of my childhood.
The weird thing I did have was two teeth growing into one spot, both a double baby tooth and then double permanent, so they had to remove the extra permanent which was done around age 10. But after that I don't think I went to regular dental checkups. They did give us that freaky red stain stuff at school that supposedly showed where you failed to brush. I wonder if the stuff was toxic or something because they stopped doing it in schools in the late 80s, although I think you can still buy the tablets.
One of my kids had the same double tooth in the same location.
64: I wish that I had had them. My sister did when she was in college. I have a bifid uvula so I wonder if my jaw is all messed up and if that affected my teeth.
So, you're asking yourselves, what did the US Supreme Court do to fuck up democracy today? Narrowed the grounds for federal habeas relief, that's what. Guy is accused of murdering a child. His defense counsel, and then his postconviction counsel neglect to do the investigation that would have shown that guy wasn't responsible for the fatal injuries. At his federal habeas trial, the judge hears extensive evidence on the matter, and concludes that the guy should get a new trial. Sorry, guy, no can do -- federal courts can't look at new evidence, even when assessing whether prior counsel's failures led to a wrongful conviction.
Further to 67: Thomas for the Court, Sotomayor, correct, as always, in dissent.
(The other case announced today is about standards for deciding whether a civil case defendant has waived an arbitration clause. At the margin, the change they made might keep a few litigants in court.)
67: I am now firmly of the view that if we're able to grow the Democratic majority by a sizeable amount that we need to expand the Court.
Before the 20th century people didn't seem pretend that the institution was something completely sacrosanct.
Every spring is going to suck like this for the foreseeable future, isn't it? April showers bring May flowers, May flowers bring fascist court decisions.
How are you on Romanism and Rebellion?
I'm probably more Catholic than the pilgrims would like.
I once unknowingly found myself at a fundraiser for the families of IRA prisoners, so I'm OK on the rebellion thing.
Not entirely sure why my two front teeth were so loose (had been loose for a long time), but at least one of the dentist/periodontist/orthodontists involved in my current work suggested that back in the day some overly aggressive orthodontia would lead to later looseness. I did have top braces for a bit due to overbite, but bottom teeth were a mess (and really needed the tooth pulled which finally got pulled). I was also lax about wearing my retainer and at some point pushing hard on it to get it to seat I snapped it in two.
A kid on one of my nature hikes a few years back opined that "I think you need braces" to the dismay of several of her classmates.
69: It would be super useful for elected Dems to start endlessly talking about the mismatch between number of circuits and number of SCOTUS seats, and probably the ratio of circuits to population/states/whatever. The former is a very appealing, nonpartisan reason to add 2 seats (conceivably 4), while the latter could get you to the 18-seat court with regularized appointment/retirement schedules.
Obviously won't win over any R votes in Congress, but IMO would make the whole thing go down a lot more smoothly with both hoi polloi and the press. And squishy elected Dems, for that matter.
Actually, on that last note, having that be the party line makes it a good compromise position for any squishes--maximalists can press for more radical solutions, and Manchin types can say that's too much, but aligning SCOUTS seats with circuits is just good governance and common sense.
My overwhelming impression of 54: brown.
Before the 20th century people didn't seem pretend that the institution was something completely sacrosanct.
There are some kinds of Supreme Court decisions that a rogue government can more or less ignore. Like telling the census bureau they can't exclude certain people. Or that you can't have segregated schools. Telling district courts what the standard of review for a federal district court habeas case is, though, is not one of them. Nor is deciding not to set aside a state criminal statute.
The asymmetry between the coalitions is, again, glaring. The kinds of decisions we'd like to ignore are the kinds that can't be ignored. The kinds they want to ignore can more readily be ignored. It's like with the filibuster: McConnell didn't have to get rid of it before because he didn't need to for his principal policy goals: judges and tax cuts. We on the other hand have to get rid of it for our goals. We want different things from government -- all the branches -- and so our approaches are necessarily different.
78 Terms limits for justices requires a constitutional amendment. Good luck with that. And while increased population might seem to argue for an enlarged court, I think it's a fact that case loads aren't going up. Maybe they should grant twice an many petitions as they have been -- I don't know, but I don't really have the sense that that's so. And I think they could grant substantially more petitions right now, with their existing capacity. The circuits are doing a whole bunch of the heavy appellate lifting, and you really only need the SC to weigh in in a narrow class of cases.
There's unfortunately no substitute for mobilizing voters to elect Democrats. No silver bullet, no one weird trick.
81: I don't think I was clear. I'm not saying that we don't have to agree to follow the precedents as a matter of convention. What I meant was that there was a narrative that the Court was above the fray of politics, that they had judicial philosophies but weren't partisan and that they conducted themselves better than other branches of government and could be trusted to police themselves etc.
It's one I clung to in 2000. People with experience watching the Court probably knew better. People talk like expanding the Court would be sacrilege, because it's operated this way since time immemorial. In the 19th century your nation was about half as old, so people weren't under any illusions.
But JRoth's point in 78 seems quite reasonable to me. I also find it kind of amazing that San Francisco is the only Federal Reserve bank west of anew Mexico, given the shifts in population since the Fed was initially chartered.
83: we have to mobilize, but these current justices are young, and we need to make it so that if we can elect Dems, their hands aren't completely tied.
I've been lucky--unlike my sister (and her oldest son, who has just started with braces), I've always had great teeth. Unfortunately, as I've gotten older and heavier my two front teeth have started overlapping slightly. My dentist thinks it's because I'm snoring/pushing my tongue against my teeth while sleeping, and so I need to figure that out before we talk about any kind of fix.
Mr. Robot truly loathes his teeth, and is considering having a number of them yanked and replaced with implants or something like that.
84.last is right. Dems could hold the White House and Senate for 6 more years and still not be able to regain the majority--Alito is only 72, and everyone else is much younger. I'm not even 50, and the Trump justices are all likely to outlive me. It's just not tenable to have a rogue SCOTUS for the next 30+ years no matter how people vote.
If we treat 80 as retirement age/old age for justices, the median seat doesn't open up until 2035. Replacing Thomas with a Dem probably gets the court out of its present lawlessness, but Roberts is absolutely an enemy to everything Democrats want to accomplish, and willing to bend the plain letter of the law and Constitution to do it, even if he's not nakedly anti-democracy like the Fascist Five to his right.
I support expanding the size of the court to 13, maybe in two tranches -- but it would take a lot more than candidates talking about this* to get enough of a mandate that you could do it legislatively. Roosevelt's feint in that direction dug the hole a bit deeper, and most unplugged people accept that 9 is the number because, for all of the relevant time period, 9 have been the number. Just like baseball.
I agree with 87: If we were writing a new Constitution, having 80 or even 70, as a retirement age for all federal officials/employees would be great -- maybe with annual exceptions that would have to be approved by Congress in exceptional situations. We're not writing a new constitution, and so long time judicial service, like the Senate, are facts to operate around. Which is why no one should ever not support the Democratic nominee for President. Ever, but especially not for 11th dimensional chess reasons that never work out But here we are: fucked by fascists, and a tiny faction of anti-fascist splitters.
*Clinton should definitely not have made her campaign all about emails.
Expand the court to 19 justices.
If we are indulging hypotheticals, amend the constitution such that they serve a staggered 19 year term. Each year the President nominates a new Justice and unless the Senate disapproves the appointment the Justice is seated. Pick a disapproval threshold high enough to prevent one party from blocking all nominations and low enough to prevent the president from appointing his horse. Or Harriet Miers. Maybe 55 votes?
The President can keep nominating Justices for a term until a Justice is successfully appointed. The Justice then serves out the remainder of that term. If a Justice dies or otherwise leaves office, a new Justice can be appointed for the remainder of that term.
Making the process routine and reducing the impact of each individual justice should lower the temperature on nominations.
Expand the court to 19 justices.
If we are indulging hypotheticals, amend the constitution such that they serve a staggered 19 year term. Each year the President nominates a new Justice and unless the Senate disapproves the appointment the Justice is seated. Pick a disapproval threshold high enough to prevent one party from blocking all nominations and low enough to prevent the president from appointing his horse. Or Harriet Miers. Maybe 55 votes?
The President can keep nominating Justices for a term until a Justice is successfully appointed. The Justice then serves out the remainder of that term. If a Justice dies or otherwise leaves office, a new Justice can be appointed for the remainder of that term.
Making the process routine and reducing the impact of each individual justice should lower the temperature on nominations.
but it would take a lot more than candidates talking about this* to get enough of a mandate that you could do it legislatively
I wouldn't expect it to become some sort of popular cause like child care subsidies or whatever, I just want it talked up enough that people recognize it as an argument that has internal logic beyond court-packing and that the press feels obligated to treat it as a serious/sincere claim.
One of the structural imbalances between the parties isn't just message discipline (and the media framework to enforce it), but that Dems/liberals tend to be sincere wonks* and also parts of discreet groups, so even when there's consensus on a point, you can't get everyone using the same arguments. That's not always a weakness--sometimes it's good to have a range of arguments so that many different people will find one appealing--but it really makes naked partisanship hard because alongside the people making the most compelling argument you'll have people saying the nakedly partisan one ("we need DC to become a state so Manchin will no longer have so much power in the Senate" is not a compelling way to get Manchin to vote for DC statehood).
*the old hack gap, kind of
On the retirement thing, I know there's both senior status and people trying to push the norm of early/planned retirement. Would it be at all plausible to pass legislation that said (essentially) SCOTUS shall have 11 (or whatever) justices under the age of 80? Maybe combine that with some jiggering to senior status such that someone like RBG would have A. known that, whatever her health, a seat would open up when she turned 80, but she could B. choose senior status before then to open ups a seat to a young person without having to leave the Court entirely.
You'd still have justices gaming how to retire strategically, but you'd put a hard timeline onto how they fit into the majority. I dunno, just spitballing.