Dr² Philip Skiba

This Little-Known Appeal Could Force Your Insurer to Pay for Lifesaving Care. Here’s How to File It. When a health insurer refuses to pay for your treatment, you may have the right to have the denial reviewed — and potentially overturned — by an independent provider. Here are six steps experts sugges...

They are one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, and only a tiny fraction of those eligible actually use them.

How a little-known appeal could force your insurer to pay for lifesaving care

www.propublica.org/article/heal...

I will ride or die for Zelda.

Maybe the Looney Tunes short most relevant to our times: 1956's TO HARE IS HUMAN, in which Wile E. Coyote creates a computer to think for him and slavishly obeys everything it tells him to do, no matter how self-destructive.

Preach.

Me, except Jaws, Star Trek, and first-pressing Bob Marley vinyl cc: @drmarkburnley.bsky.social

Watching a Jane Goodall documentary. There’s a part where the chimps suffered a devastating polio outbreak in Gombe. The outbreak started in humans.

She and her team vaccinated the chimps because the vaccines save lives.

Unreal that our HHS Secretary is actively trying to convince us otherwise.

Sad news, but an extraordinary legacy.

Amen.

Rachel wearing very flimsy looking apron, mask and visor in NHS setting

Here I am in 2020 in the flimsiest, most pitful PPE - like so many other NHS staff, some of whom died from the Covid they caught in their hospitals.

Tory peer Michelle Mone - who today lost her legal case & must repay the govt £122m - dares to claim she’s been ‘scapegoated’.

What, Michelle? 🧵

How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them Internal documents and former company executives reveal how Cigna doctors reject patients’ claims without opening their files. “We literally click and submit,” one former company doctor said.

Internal documents and former company executives revealed how Cigna doctors rejected patients’ claims without opening their files.

“We literally click and submit,” one former company doctor said.

(Published March 2023 w/ @capitolforum.bsky.social)

They killed it in Asbury Park too

I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I'll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it's actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called "wildly miscalculated" and you haven't seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee. You can't help anybody when you're exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of "I would love to be dead right now" on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that's wonderful because we're not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.

RIP Kaleb Horton
kalebhorton.ghost.io/2025-so-far/

Squad goals

The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem | The Walrus Companies keep betting on the next bestseller. Literature is poorer for it

Brilliant article sent to me by a friend, which fuels the ever-present back-and-forth in my mind. Given the success of my other work (many multiples of the advances I was offered), do I skip the whole game and publish nontraditionally?

thewalrus.ca/the-publishi...

There’s an easier solution: STOP. USING. SPOTIFY.

Mosquito-Borne Illness Rarely Seen in U.S. Is Suspected on Long Island

“The New York State Department of Health is investigating a possible locally acquired case of chikungunya virus,” a department spokeswoman, Danielle De Souza, said in a statement. “No locally acquired cases have ever been reported in New York State, and the risk to the public remains very low.”

I studied and worked in the UK. The legal process was anything but uncontrolled. In fact, it was a colossal pain in the ass.

there is not one person on this site that cannot use this story today

No one should take “acetimetophin”, a chemical that was apparently just invented by this lunatic.

Fortunately, acetaminophen remains safe and well-tolerated for most humans. Pass it on.

This ought to be engraved somewhere.

ACOG reaffirms that acetaminophen is safe for managing pain and fever during pregnancy. No reputable studies support suggestions like those in HHS’s recent announcement linking acetaminophen use in pregnancy to autism; in fact, high-quality studies show no such risk. https://bit.ly/47Wxc59

Disney stock tanking…

The thoughtful conversation…

If you think Tylenol magically interacts with the many, many genetic markers of autism, I have a bridge to sell you.

He leaves only an hour for the one weird trick virtually guaranteed to extend lifespan 😂

Imagine wasting 25% of your life trying to live longer, instead of just *living*. As a guy who takes care of a lot of elderly people, believe me when I say every one of them would prefer to reclaim 6 hours at age 30, than pull off a 6-hour life extension as an octogenarian.

Photograph of John Lee Hooker with diagram of the evolution of the Blues. Black and white photograph. He’s wearing a suit and sitting at a table with a mug in front of him and notepad etc on table. Behind him is a chart diagram of the evolution of the Blues, connecting genres over time. Photograph by Clemens Kalischer, 1951.

John Lee Hooker with a diagram of the evolution of the Blues.

Many of us have been saying this for a long time. The only question is whether LLM’s are now “too big to fail” given the massive investments currently at risk.

You are never too old. I moved to Chicago at 38 and to Philly at 50. I miss Chicago. Give it a try.

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking