The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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I suppose I should just say it. I know you implied it, but someone should just say it directly. This thing that everybody involved in the system has been telling us for years... that the system is not advanced enough to find an answer to this question... is a lie. The people involved have the numbers that are required. They can just give those numbers to patients. When this is pointed out, they will lie and misdirect and do everything they can to throw up fake and imagined roadblocks to this very simple reality, to the point of playing dumb/lying about whether they are even capable of identifying the names of the numbers in question. It is the great shame of the medical industry that they have harmed so many patients by their addiction to price opacity. I've pointed before at pieces like this where they talk of patients making choices to not get care because of price opacity or situations where because talking about prices is verboten, the doctor might prescribe an expensive drug that the patient won't buy, but could have prescribed a cheaper, almost as good, drug that the patient could actually afford and would buy. I don't know how one would even estimate the number of times that people simply suffer through problems rather than seek medical help because of price opacity. They feel like if they even consider seeking medical help, they will never have any further chance to consider the cost involved. The perception is that if they do it, they're basically spinning the roulette wheel and then will learn after the fact, after services have been rendered, whether they will owe $10 or $10k. It's unsurprising that many reasonable decisionmaking-under-uncertainty-and-budget-constraint algorithms just opt out of that game of roulette.
Yeah I know, I was being sarcastic of course. They can do it upfront. They just refuse to do it because it's more convenient for them. And more profitable.
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