This is a repost from LinkedIn. The author is Rebecca Love, RN, MSN, FIEL.

This is how being Uninsured Kills. This is my Uncle Tommy…we lost him in the last 48 hours.

I hear elected officials say that not having insurance, doesn’t kill people – I want to explain to you exactly how NOT having health insurance kills people every day in this Country.

My uncle has worked two jobs nearly his entire life, one at the local grocery store, and the other as a painter in an Idaho Ski town, minimum wage in Idaho is $7.25 an hour. His employers didn’t offer health insurance for his role and he couldn’t afford the premiums of private insurance being in his early 60s.

He is what you define as the working poor – making too much to qualify for Medicaid; but not making enough to be able to afford a $500+ month health insurance premium on the health exchange.

You see in Idaho, to qualify for #Medicaid you can’t make more than 138% of the federal poverty level, the federal poverty level is $15,650; so 138% = $21,597. My uncle on a good year made somewhere between $40,000-$45,000 a year.

So when he was feeling unwell with a cough the past couple of weeks, he didn’t go to the local urgent care to see a doctor and get the antibiotics he needed, because a visit like that would have cost him $300-$500, extra money he just didn’t have.

So as he got worse, he just kept pushing through, until he couldn’t.

Friday, he couldn’t ignore the growing chest pain so his girlfriend of 30 years, took him to his local small critical access hospital in rural Idaho, where he was diagnosed with bilateral pneumonia and sepsis.

Too critical to be treated there, he was air flighted to the nearest hospital over 80 miles away. On the way, he had a major heart attack; was intubated, but didn’t make it.

He died from a completely preventable illness, one that if he had insurance, could have gone to a local urgent care to get the antibiotics that would prevented the pneumonia, sepsis and saved his life. But because he didn’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford the out of pocket expenses of urgent care without it, he didn’t seek care in time.

I do not understand how we keep failing millions of Americans, who every day work hard to try to get ahead, work multiple jobs, and still can’t afford health insurance. So they scrape by, hoping not to get sick, but when they do – it’s often too late.

I saw it time and time again as a nurse, and now personally.

And what is shocking, is the Big Beautiful Bill, will make 16 million Americans ineligible for Medicaid. Leaving them uninsured. Adding to the 26 million uninsured Americans in the US today - all with little talk over the repercussions of what this means to actual American lives. But god - we have to do better as a nation.

Because this matters. Every single day to the lives of loved ones, who being uninsured costs them their lives.

RIP Uncle Tommy. I hope you catch that big fish in the sky. You will be missed.

#insurance #healthinsurance #publichealth

Link to the original: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebeccalovenursing_uninsured-medicaid-idaho-activity-7345077338927210496-Mx0W

They are starting to get it ...

Remember when Internet Explorer warned us from going to an https website?

Gajim 2.3 has been released 🥳

A fresh new look for Gajim arrived! 😎
With this release Gajim introduces Adwaita, a library providing styles, nicely designed user interface elements, animations and more. Many dialogs, including Preferences and Plugin management have been redesigned.

This release is available on Windows again - finally!

Thank you for all your contributions! ❤️

Support Gajim's development: https://liberapay.com/Gajim

#gajim #xmpp #chat

https://gajim.org/posts/2025-06-29-gajim-2.3.0-released/

Looks like the Jabber/XMPP community will have a booth at @FrOSCon this year.

August 16th and 17th. Save the date. See you there.

I promise we will bring stickers!

https://froscon.org/

#XMPP #Jabber #Conversations_im

hi I fine-tuned my anti-LLM measures on dersco.re. Now you shouldn't need to do anything other than enable cookies to access it. All you do is wait and look at that moving spinner.

If you are having issues please let me know.

And as always, huge thanks to low-effort LLM scrapers for making my life more difficult!

#3109 - Dehumidifier

linkedin: what if CHINA's military controlled software running in your airplane or car

me: what if the CIA controlled software running in your airplane or car

It has gone zero days since the latest slop

Today in #ITSecurity gone wrong: I am in Austria as a German. I just received a notification via cell broadcast about a fire in the area. The broadcast contains a URL - but this URL is only accessible from an Austrian IP address. My LTE roaming IP isn’t allowed. So… I guess I just suffocate because I have the wrong IP address, then? 😅

where we're going, we don't need any xlibre nonsense

damn, first #wayback pull request within an hour of publishing. thanks @fossdd !

#wayback, a small project gluing together wayland components to turn Xwayland into a full X environment, is now published: https://github.com/kaniini/wayback

there's definitely a gazillion bugs, which will need work across the entire stack to solve.

however, unlike Xlibre, this is a sustainable path that is intended to reduce the number of X components in distributions.

We'd like to welcome @fossdd and Mio as new Alpine Linux developers.

We really appreciate all the work they and the rest of the community have done.

#AlpineLinux

The countdown is on—less than 3 months to go before the 12th edition, and a few spots are still up for grabs!

https://www.billetweb.fr/kernel-recipes-2025

Our mascot’s slipping into some très French outfits this year—beret, stripes, maybe even a baguette... Here's a sneak peek! The drawings will be auctioned off to support Restos du Cœur.

(the mascot's mom is Emma Tizzoni)

I've been working on Fedilab and few other open source projects since around 2017. It was a so good experience, having your feedback and your help. At the time I was financially comfortable and it helped me to spend time to develop useful software. But now, I am unfortunately facing some bad events in life. Each month started to be harder for me. I simply don't know how to ask you to help me financially. I have been accepting donations, but it has been to help the projects, not me personally.

i spent too much time on this

Čara🐈‍⬛ is happy with life. #FediCats