They've raised my rates by forty percent.
So let's look at the history, shall we?
Original premium, 2007: $390 ($2,000 deductible)EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN DOLLARS. That's every three months, for a grand total of $2,460 per year.
July 2010: $460
October 2010: $550
October 2011: $585 (after increasing my deductible to $5,000)
October 2012: $815
There's no way I can afford that, of course, so now I'm going to have to get myself a catastrophic care policy and pay out-of-pocket for everything. Hopefully in the long term it'll be cheaper than this shit.
This hike comes a scant three months before most of Obamacare goes into effect in January of 2013. Obamacare was sold to the public on the theory that it would lower costs and make health care more affordable. That's the official name of the abomination, "Affordable Health Care Act", but--as I and a bunch of my fellows predicted!--it is doing anything but making health care affordable.
Attention Democrats and Obama:
STOP HELPING.
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Although I must admit my first impulse does not behoove me as a Christian, I want to beat this useless wad of protoplasm senseless with a Motorola DynaTac 8000.
(DynaTac 8000.)
Okay, if you're whining and bitching because the guy selling you a new cell phone on its release day doesn't give you a chance to bask in the orgasmic glow of your new techno-gewgaw, you need a fucking life. (And, as I said, a beating.)
Nausea-inducing whiny bitch sobbing quote from the page Marko links to:
My stomach sank. Opening an Apple product is a religious experience. It’s one of the best things about the first day with your shiny new device. He took that from me. I felt like this sales rep had stolen from me. They were stealing from everyone. No one was opening their new iPhone. Is it not supposed to be special anymore? Then why does Apple continue to spend 3, 5, or 10 times as much on packaging and presentation as other companies?I'm almost entirely dumbstruck by this idiocy, so I'll let Marko do the talking:
The folks at the phone store don’t have the time to let every customer spend fifteen minutes ritually unpacking and getting to know their new iPhone. On iPhone launch day, these places are wall-to-wall with hipster kids looking to pick up their new phones between hitting Starbucks and pretending to go to class.Entitled, self-important, hipster douchebag kids. Shit.
* * *
Torchlight 2 has gone live, and is $20. I'm not buying it this week; Mists of Pandaria goes live on Tuesday morning and I'll be playing that.
And Jason is already having trouble with the new expansion:
To be fair, though, the new talent and spell systems are pretty transparent and not much reconfiguring of your character is required.
My only real complaint with it? The main damage spell for the mage character class is "Arcane Missiles" and Blizzard severely nerfed the proc rate for it, so now I can be in combat with something and not have it proc once. (Only to have it proc three times in a row on the next monster, BTW, so in some respects it's a balance problem.)
* * *
Got up this morning and it was 64 in the bunker. I turned the heat on. One week before October--well, that seems to be par for the course in the Fungal Vale.
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Incidentally, I've enabled LJ's CAPTCHA system for comments for the time being, since LJ is having trouble with comment spam. I had to manually eradicate some 30 of them this morning.
If you can't post a comment because of the CAPTCHA system (I've had this kind of trouble myself) you can e-mail me at edhering [at] gmail [dotty] com if you want to comment, and I'll post them manually until this shit is dealt with.
ADENDUM: The spammers are blowing right past the CAPTCHA so now only my LJ friends can post comments--again, until this BS is dispensed with. So e-mail me your comments and I'll post 'em.