u/awgeez47

My insurance says that it's up to me to contact providers to ensure they actually take my insurance. They say that all they can check is whether a provider is listed in the current directory (the same one I can see on the insurance company website). I can personally attest that plenty of providers in that directory do NOT accept my insurance in reality. And with this insurance plan, it's almost always the case that only a subset of providers at any given location or office are covered -- just because one doctor is covered by my insurance doesn't mean another one at the same location will be.

The big medical group in town says that it's not up to them to determine which providers are covered by my insurance, I have to call the insurance company. They said that all they can see on their end is whether my insurance account is active and if my plan is generally taken by the hospital group. They scoffed at the idea that the insurance said to ask them and said I must've spoken to someone inexperienced. (I've been told this many many times by the insurance.)

There is no way for me to ask the actual provider's office, it's an enormous multi-hospital system and making appointments/insurance/billing are all handled totally separately from the actual physicians.

Who is supposed to be able to say whether a provider is covered?! This buck passing is going to make me tear my hair out.

tl;dr I need to see a hematologist, how do I find out which ones insurance will cover?!

Has anyone here had tinnitus caused by TMJ and/or neck issues? If so, what has helped you?

(Backstory: Six weeks ago I started feeling ear stuffiness on one side. Three weeks ago it escalated to tinnitus. Now it’s on both sides. Went to the dentist and the ENT and got diagnosed with TMJ. Which makes sense, since I know it’s super common with EDS and I’m a teeth clencher in my sleep. And evidently it can be a direct cause of exactly the ear issues I’m having.

My neck, ugh, bane of my existence, constant constant pain in the muscles trying to stabilize it, especially the SCM and scalenes. And I have one vertebrae that likes to rotate itself out of position, fun.)

I know my neck and jaw are causing the tinnitus because it changes in pitch(!) or volume based on how I move my neck or jaw. Or when I’m getting the muscle knots in either spot dry needled by my awesome PT. But I don’t know how to reverse it and it keeps getting worse. I do have a nighttime bite guard, the kind you make yourself by taking a mold of your teeth at home, not the $300 dentist one, and have started wearing it again.

Has anything helped you with either tinnitus, TMJ, or neck problems and myofascial pain?? Would love ideas.

A huge summer thunderstorm is rolling in tonight and the sky is basically like a strobe light right now: constant lightning flickering through the cloud cover. At my husband’s behest, I watched the light show for a couple minutes and BOOM, as soon as I glanced away, scintillating scotoma.

I’ve only had a handful of visual aura migraines, all in the last few years, so this was probably a rookie mistake. But WOW, just when you think you’re safe, man. Anyone else made this discovery while observing the ~•~glory of nature~•~?

Now hiding out in my bathroom with no windows, after popping one of my precious precious few remaining Nurtec. Oy.

After the out-of-pocket maximum has been met, is there any way the patient would still be on the hook for facility fee charges/coinsurance?

(Context: The major hospital group in my city does ALL their hearing tests and otolaryngology visits in offices on hospital campuses. I just spoke to the billing estimates office and they confirmed they DO charge them as outpatient hospital visits — which I suspected, because I had this issue (with different insurance) when one of my specialists in the same group changed how their office billed. At that time, my facility fee copay was $500 which seemed overwhelming.

My new insurance has a $5,000 facility fee copay and I’m required to make two separate visits (one for a hearing test, one to actually have my ear issue looked at). I passed my OOP max months ago — lucky me — but I’m nervous this type of charge is somehow carved out and doesn’t qualify for the post-maximum 100% coverage?

Yes, I’m going to try to talk to my insurance, but this is a time sensitive issue healthwise, and it generally takes a long time to get any kind of definitive answer from them. I managed to grab a last minute opening to be seen tomorrow and if I cancel it the next appointment isn’t for weeks.

I thought it was a dental issue but the dentist said to go see an ENT specialist, and not to bother with urgent care.

I found a provider outside the hospital group in my insurance’s database, but their office flat out refused to take my insurance plan when they heard what it was.

I’m going to lose my shit if my hearing is somehow permanently damaged because I can’t find timely care at a reasonable location without facing $10k of charges.)

Doing French vocab flashcards.

Duolingo: Romance
Me: D’amour. D’amour. D’amour. [The translation the app always uses.]
Duolingo: BZZZT. “Romance”

Duolingo, same card, same exercise: Romance (This time it asked me to type the answer, not say it.)
Me: (Typing) Romance.
Duolingo: BZZZT. WRONG. The answer was “D’amour”.

wtaf. WHY are you GASLIGHTING ME, Duolingo? This is what happens when you farm out your content to AIs. I don’t get it, perfectly fine content already existed in the app. Why do they continue to replace it with garbage?

(And before anyone points it out, yes, both translations can apply, the issue is that it said the answer was one thing, then said the same answer was wrong. Yes yes I’ve called the wahhhmbulance.)

EDITED TO ADD: I just went back to the app and it told me that the French translation of “the ones that” is “the ones that”. Go home, Duo, you’re drunk.

I'm going out of town for about 2 weeks and wanna be able to replicate my Toddy cold brew system. (Nothing hits right for me like coffee strained through the Toddy felt filter. I've tried loads of alternatives, including cheesecloth, which is nice and portable, but it doesn't come out tasting the way I like. Why? idk! But I just wanna stick with my filter that reliably makes what I want to drink.)

In the past on long-ish trips like this, I've actually brought my big dumb white plastic Toddy container, in order to be able to make good cold brew. (Since then, I've started doing the overnight stage in a big glass carafe and only using the white container for the filtering part, which has made me more confident about not being tied to it.)

This time I'm thinking of skipping the white container: I could steep in an alternate vessel like I do with my glass carafe. And then I could probably sort of stuff the filter into a kitchen funnel, then veeeery slowly pour the steeped coffee through it, 'til I have a full batch. I'll also bring a cloth filter bag (and have paper as an option too), so the grounds will be contained.

What do y'all think? Would this work, without being ultra messy? Any better ideas?

I’m level 83 in french. Not incredible but, you know, my vocab is pretty decent. But since the message a couple days ago that said they’ve changed some things, I’ve just been getting drilled over and over on incredibly basic “first day of first French class”-level words… Yes, no, hello, and, thank you… etc.

And not just once or twice but over and over… If I do a words/vocab practice session or the flashcards it just loops me through the same shitty basic set of words. WTF. Has anyone else been experiencing this? Obviously, it’s good practice to occasionally review older vocab terms, but that’s not what’s going on here, it’s just worthless busy work.

…and am I wrong to think this is happening because they now have AI making up their content (I think?)?

I'm trying to book a stay using points, which cover the entire reservation. There's also a Mastercard saved to the account and applied to the reservation. However, when I click 'Book Now', I get this message:

>Correction Needed.

>Before you book... The payment method you entered is not accepted at this property, please proceed with a different form of payment.

But... my payment method is points. Are they saying this property, a Courtyard by Marriott which I found via their own booking interface, does not take points? Or could it be the card? (At first I thought I'd tried to use an Amex or something.) Is it likely just a glitch and the system is down?

Appreciate any insight, if you have it!

I have a crapton of .epub documents on my Kindle.

1. As you know, when we finish reading a document, it's supposed to be automatically switched from "unread" to "read". Except it doesn't, for me. (Mostly. In some cases it does work correctly, but I can't figure out a pattern to when/why.) I have literally hundreds of documents like this... which makes the 'Unread' filter basically useless. Which is how I browse!
2. Weirdly, those documents are correctly marked with the "read" status on all OTHER Kindle interfaces: the 'Manage Your Content' webpage, the iOS Kindle app, and the OSX Kindle app. So I can't even try to mark them as read via a more convenient interface.
3. I can manually mark a document as read on the Kindle. But I have to do it one at a time: each one takes multiple taps and the Kindle hangs/freezes for several seconds after each one. Totally not feasible to do for hundreds of docs.

Any ideas on how to get the docs marked as "read" in the cloud to switch over to that status on the device?

• I'm on a Kindle Oasis on the latest software (5.18.2), but I think this was also happening on my old Paperwhite. I've tried restarting.
• I have Whispersync on and Goodreads unlinked.
• The docs were added to the device via the official Amazon Send-to-Kindle email feature.