There will be things that your insurance plan will just randomly decide not to cover or worse, you just don't have the right kind of insurance for what you need.
Both my parents have suffered strokes. My father had to go to a step down unit which requires Long Term Care Insurance, something that I'm willing to bet most people aren't familiar with. Even that, due to changing regulations, your LTCI that you purchased decades ago most likely no longer covers today's prices. Unfortunately you just can't prepare for everything.
I do have health insurance but it only covers around 47% of my medical costs (at least when I go for a primary care visit, I suspect they might even cover less for a more expensive procedure).
I understand that my coverage is not all that common, although most providers do an 80/20 split. So for a procedure costing $100k (an ambulance ride and a few nights in the hospital would easily run this high) you'd have to pay $20k out of pocket.
> I do have health insurance but it only covers around 47% of my medical costs (at least when I go for a primary care visit, I suspect they might even cover less for a more expensive procedure).
Actually, it's the opposite. For the vast majority of insurance plans, there's an annual limit to your copay.
To be honest, if there weren't that limit there would be no purpose to insurance at all.
A few years ago there was no annual limit on my plan. Not with co-pays, just co-insurance. I ended up needing outpatient treatment almost every day for over a month. Each day was a $25 co-pay. I then moved on to a once a week treatment for close to the next year. I could afford that, many people cannot. I was also lucky to be able to collect my pay while I was getting treated because my employer provided me disability. The cost just skyrocketed beyond belief and while I already maxed out my co-insurance my treatment was billed like an office visit so co-pays are treated differently.
It's called "out of pocket limit". After you meet your deductible the insurance company will pay for every covered cost except for the copay and coinsurance. Once you've met your out of pocket max they will pay for every dollar of every covered cost.
Except prescription drugs. I am not fully informed on how the ACA affected this, but it used to be that insurance plans could exclude certain classes of prescription drugs from out of pocket max.
This is how many people are financially ruined by long-term chronic illnesses. For some less common diseases, medications can easily cost >$10,000 per month – which might not be covered by your health insurance for various reasons or only partially covered. Read the fine print.
Many health insurance plans have a yearly cap on how much you pay out of pocket. So you might pay 20% up to a few thousand dollars, and then get 100% coverage after that.
Actually, with the passage of the ACA, the limit is a requirement for all health insurance plans (a few were grandfathered in, but they will disappear over the next few years).
It goes up each year (adjusted for inflation), but as an individual, your maximum out of pocket (includes everything: deductible, co-pays, co-insurance, etc) is ~$6,750.
I'll never forget the year I had laproscopic surgery to remove my gallbladder, not because of the experience (although being asked for $3000, in cash, before they'd let me into the OR, was interesting, but welcome to America), but because I ended up hitting my $5000 or so out-of-pocket maximum, between that and co-pays for a few other visits. For the remaining 6 months of the year, I joked that I was living it up Canadian style, and actually visited the doctor to get regular exams and to get medicated for influenza, you know, the things everyone should do, but a large double-digit percentage of Americans can't. Ahh, the good life...
Don't "suspect," know. Your insurance will have an extensive description of their coverage. You should go read it, and if you find it to be inadequate, you should go shopping for new stuff. This is really important and not something to ignore.
The way you are phrasing this is super offensive and border line disgusting. Do you really think its a privilege that women have this "option"? What if someone offered you a promotion if your wife gave him blowjobs? Would you consider that a sweet opportunity? You want to picture that?
You really contradict yourself here. Why is it worrying that your cultural diversity isn't representative of the demographics of California and yet it doesn't worry you that women are under represented?
Because we're going to have a discussion on diversity regardless of my personal convictions and I would prefer that we focus on being more inclusive of minorities and spreading "hacker culture" to low income neighborhoods (ie: people for whom the barrier to entry may be as high as simply being unable to afford a computer to code on).
Obviously, educating all young people about computer science and technology is great. However, providing specialized groups and targeting minorities in the field is a great way to provide those folks with mentors and people they can look up to. It's nice when you can see someone like yourself who made it to the top of their field. Sometimes that is hard to see if you're a minority.
I am a female programmer and started really young. In 7th grade, I remember being afraid that people would find out I liked computers and had a website. I was afraid of standing out and being labeled a nerd. I didn't know any girls who liked computers and probably wouldn't have signed up for a program that wasn't specifically for girls. Being a kid in middle school is a tricky time and having a safe environment to learn and be yourself around like minded people can make a big difference.
To this day, I still feel quite a bit more comfortable at women coding events than tech talks where I am one of 3 women with 100 guys. I definitely think specialized groups can provide a more conducive place for learning when you're in a minority group. I think calling it discrimination is a bit short sighted.
The agenda is to make the tech community a more hospitable place for women who WANT to be in tech. It's not an agenda to force women into the industry just for the sake of numbers.
>Get women hired. Make your workplace give a fuck about hiring diverse teams. You are in a wonderful position to advocate and agitate for more diversity in your workplace. Draw attention to your company’s demographics internally, bring in speakers on building team diversity, start a committee dedicated to auditing and improving the hiring process. Oh and make sure this doesn’t just end up in a position where you just hire a few white women and call it a day. Not good enough.
I don't agree with diversity for the sake of diversity. So no, I'll hire the most qualified candidate regardless of race/gender.
No one is saying hire a woman who is less qualified just for the sake of diversity. In that comment, Shanley is asking you to CARE about diversity and look at your hiring processes and company culture to see if what you're doing can be improved. Maybe your company is all white males because you're recruiting at events where only white males go? Maybe you can host a Women Who Code event or go to women's conferences and attract top talent there.
However that does sometimes become the end result due to a shortage of good, diverse candidates. In the end you have "hire anyone who meets these demographic criteria just so we can check diversity off our list and call ourselves 'inclusive'".
The problem is not men hitting on us and it being awkward. I can handle that, whatever. The issue is being seen as ONLY sexual objects. Normally things start out great. Oh, you're a girl in tech? That's so awesome. Now I can talk tech, a topic I'm comfortable with. However, I can't tell you how many times I've mentioned my fiance and the conversation comes to a screeching halt, see ya. Or I let it go on without mentioning anything, and the boundary isn't set and there is awkwardness later on. It is a different dynamic and tricky to navigate. If I was a guy, they'd be happy to talk business and learn about my startup. We never got to that. I find it hard to have as positive of an experience networking as my male coworkers seem to have. I'm not saying this is sexism or any other loaded words, its just a challenge.
So while being a technical female has a lot of positives (we are more rare and stand out and people might find us pretty and want to talk to us), there are legitimate issues regarding professionalism in work and conferences. No one is saying men are monsters...well, I'm certainly not.
> If I was a guy, they'd be happy to talk business and learn about my startup.
That's unlikely. If you were a guy they wouldn't be talking to you at all. Even less likely they'd do so with genuine interest. That is the experience most males have in such conferences. Few men get any kind of attention from anyone without putting in a lot of effort.
Having men lose interest in you after your fiancée is mentioned doesn't tell you anything about the likelihood of them seeing you only as a sexual object. Could just as well be a human object they want to love.
