Never said that there would never be a claim for the baby; there always will be, in point of fact. Whether or not the baby’s claim is actually reimbursable depends on sick baby vs. well baby and/or the terms of the insurance contract.

Medical billing is weird.

That is not remotely how deductibles work and they should not let that slide. If you have insurance, even if the charges are less than your deductible and the insurance company wouldn’t actually pay anything, if you’re in-network the provider must offer you the insurance contract rate, to wit:

For practical purposes, it is; notice that over 80% of the total charges were adjusted off due to the insurance contract. For resource management and assorted other accounting reasons, though, everything in a hospital service is parceled out piecemeal at first and then bundled up for pricing in the final analysis.

My favorite birth billing story is my SIL/BIL. With my niece, they’d met their deductible for the year, so the hospital billed the entire procedure to the new baby and refused any negotiation on the matter.

The more I see of Trump, the more I think he is actually the worst person in America (non-murderer category). I would not buy a bagel from that man.

Children are literally excluded from diagnosis of psychopathy and sociopathy (they have conduct disorder instead, a history of which is one of the diagnostic factors for the grown-up version). I believe this is in no small measure due to the fact that personality isn’t fully formed in adolescence—the ddx for…

And in point of fact, since the loss in question was reported as negative adjusted GROSS income, he would not have to earn $50M/year NET of taxes anyway to break even.

Yeah, see, “net” does not mean “after taxes.” It means “after factoring in all losses.” So if he loses a billion dollars in year 1 and earns 50 million in years 2 through 21, then over the course of those 21 years his NET income is zero. Good try, though.

You understand what the word “net” means in this context, right?

Think your autocorrect got a little carried away with this one, H. (Lewy, Reese, Robbie—one for two there, Phillippe, and Kenyan Thompson).

Man, read the article and my comment. I said “based on available information.” The available information is that he wrote off $900M+ in 1995 and has publicly-known income in the neighborhood of $45-50M pa since. For him to have been liable to taxes he’d’ve had to have additional income sources (which the public has a…

Though to be fair, I did get snowed a bit by your discourse on capital gains and losses and whatnot. Trump declared $915M in ordinary (not capital) losses, so the capital gains laws are kind of a lot of irrelevant here, no?

I didn’t miss jack; however, you completely missed the part where I said “based on available information.” I admit it’s not MUCH information, but it’s all we have, and it shows exactly what the Times says it shows: that he took such a powder in 1995 that he may have been able to offset every penny of income since.

Okay, you may be right insofar as tax practices are concerned, but the upshot is that based on available information he either a) made zero net dollars over the last twenty years—which tends to undermine his whole “I’m the world’s greatest dealmaker” shtick—or b) cheated on his taxes. There is no way Trump looks…

Literally none of the things he alleges can, let alone would happen. Citizenship authorities take their shit seriously and no office Hillary has ever held can even plausibly give them orders, lawful or otherwise.

This, in turn, has led us to the awesome (not in a good way) state of affairs in which Snopes is having to Google “Alicia Machado sex tape” and then confirm that the woman actually appearing in the results is actual porn star Angel Dark.

Well done.

They exist as fora and moral authorities. If the UNGA decided tomorrow that the U.S. committed crimes against humanity and should pay damages... we wouldn’t pay damages. If the UNGA decided Germany hasn’t paid enough for the holocaust... they also wouldn’t pay damages.

Citizens don’t have the right to sue their own government for damages. The 11th Amendment makes that abundantly clear. The U.S. government, in its generosity, passed the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act to allow suits for damages in limited circumstances, but you can’t, say, sue Donald Rumsfeld, let alone the entire U.S.,…