Awesome! My friend works for the Children's Inn at the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., which hosts families and children involved in federal clinical trials. It's really one of the big unknown expenses of medical care, I think - insurance may pay for your treatment, but what do you do if the only place that…

Just to clarify - Christopher's Haven is an organization that offers low-cost housing and support services to children with cancer and their families. It's an awesome organization providing desperately needed services, but it's not a hospital.

Right, and I think they also investigated that. I'm not sure if they also looked into private coverage because COBRA is so expensive (although cheaper than being uninsured and pregnant.)

"Media" has to have been omitted from that sentence, right? "Social media"? Then it almost, but not quite, makes sense.

After a great deal of effort in their parts, I believe they negotiated with company B to allow them (and the other employees) to continue the insurance they had with Company A. It didn't get resolved until more than midway through her pregnancy, though, which was obviously very stressful for everyone involved.…

For fuck's sake. Pre-ACA, a friend of mine got pregnant just as her husband's company was bought by another. They were told that they'd get to keep their prior health insurance - but oops, they weren't. So, pregnant and uninsured, my friend tried to get them insurance on the private market. She was told multiple times…

Race-baiting: pointing out things that we'd prefer to politely overlook.

I don't think you said anything controversial at all. You sound perfectly reasonable to me.

You know, WebMD isn't a terrible resource! Neither is mayoclinic.com or kidshealth.org. The problem is when people blindly accept all information they find on the internet as fact, regardless of the source or the interests of the people publishing it. We need better-informed patients, not totally uninformed patients.

I got married at the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington, D.C., which is a beautiful building that Andrew Carnegie apparently built with vague intentions of promoting science somewhere. Unbeknownst to me and the Kentuckian-by-marriage*, Ralph Nader inexplicably has an office there. And was there that Saturday…

Shape + Fitness = Shitness

I'd be cool with Jada Pinkett Smith as Blade. But not KStew, with her one facial expression.

Those are good points - I only have the one kid, and at five months he's too little to know or care about hanging out with other kids. I will say that he didn't start catching colds until he started daycare. All things equal, I'm surprised there haven't been MORE disease outbreaks at places like Disneyland.

I certainly don't blame the parent of any child who was simply too young to be vaccinated, but our doctor does recommend avoiding places with lots of kids - like the kid's sing-a-long at the public library, and I guess Disneyland - until they've had their first round of shots.

Okay, Goop's "Sex Powder" costs $60 for four ounces. It's "wild-crafted" ingredients include "Epimedium, Ho Sho Wu, Schizandra, Cristanche, Shilajit, Maca, Cacao, Lo Han Guo, Stevia." I'm pretty everything but cacao and stevia are Chinese herbs representing the ancient principles of "bullshit" and "gullibility".

I got salon perms from age 9 until 12. My mother really wanted me to have curly hair. I didn't have the problems with breakage that everyone is describing, but it also never looked curly; it always fell into uniform waves, like a cocker spaniel's pelt.

He's sitting in front of a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. I'm just surprised it's not a complete set of "World Book."

They're making a new Rocky movie? What is this - Rocky VIII? Rocky IX? I've honestly lost count.

Can we call for a moratorium on politicians of any stripe using the word "folks"? It sounds so cheesy and fake. I'd also like to strike the words and phrases "heartland", "homeland", "real Americans", "the great state of" and "my good friend" from any politician's public discourse. Whatever they say behind closed…

I occasionally read righty conservative blogs to remind myself why I'm a lefty liberal. A common lament of these blogs is the decline of organized religion, particularly among the young. And yet they never seem to question how non-sensical rants like this one — "Ellen DeGeneres and Taylor Swift are turning your…