1373 Groucho.

This page won’t be a surprise to those of you who read the comments. This part is being split so we can see some of the other characters before 2016. XD Rest assured, John will tell his story eventually.

Here’s a fun fact, did you know that the bill for a hospital stay doesn’t include a doctor coming to see you for less than 5 minutes? It does not. It’s a separate charge. A very expensive charge I might add. The amount of money versus time spent with me is truly staggering. It was bad enough when I thought it was included in my hospital stay. A stay that would not have been 3 days if they had simply done the scan and set me free. It’s all pretty irritating. The lesson here is take care of yourself and never come into contact with medical personnel if at all possible. They are like black holes for cash.

I have decided that next year I am taking advantage of all the loopholes and whatnot that rich people do when they do their taxes. So I’ve got a little place for receipts and everything now. If I can write it off I’m writing it off. Postage, supplies, whatever. No more of this poor person nonsense of just paying whatever they say I should pay and hoping they don’t send thugs to hassle me. I really don’t like being made to feel like a criminal every year when tax time comes around.

I’ve been selling off some of my old games on eBay. I took really good care of them, even the boxes, so collectors like them. I’m also slashing prices because I’m sick of having them around. Right now it’s mostly old Lucasarts games for the SNES. Not rare except in so much as I have pristine boxes and inserts. Of course all that money is going to be taken by the doctor thing, so it’s not as fun as it was when I was just getting some extra money…

I need to get over my prudishness and just draw porn. That’s where the money is.

47 Comments

Actually there is no money in porn. Unless you become a popular manga artist in Japan and your stories are all based on Anime character ships.

If you are none of those, your stuff will just get rehosted on free websites.

Now YouTube, on the other hand, that is where the money is.

Make 3 minute montage videos of you trolling your friends in games, make 3 of them a day, and you will be rolling in YouTube bucks.

On the medical bills comment, you should be able to contact the medical companies that billed you for summaries of what you paid them. It could help keep the stack of receipts down.

I think Willis figured that porn stuff out a while ago, and that’s where his Slipshine stuff came in. He just gave his audience what they didn’t have the imagination/artistic ability to do themselves.

I know that it might not help, but there are ways to haggle down medical bills, you could try looking into that. I don’t know if it would help in your situation, but i know it’s possible.

I got ripped off by an ER visit too…evidently the hospital accepted my insurance provider, but the doctor that took care of the medical issue didn’t, so I got a bill despite having already paid the copay. Such bullshit.

If possible, I think you could get a two room suite at one of the finer hotels, hire a sleep in nurse (in the second room, perverts), and have a doctor stop in for 15 minutes a day, and it would be cheaper. Most patients don’t need a crash cart at the ready, and the average nurse can probably handle 98% of problems. Honestly, since they actually spend time with patients all day, they’re probably better diagnosticians than half of the doctors, and I’d be surprised if half the doctors at a hospital could start an IV in under a half hour, since the nurses that do it all day often have problems.

If there’s one thing my country actually does semi-right, it’s medical care paid for by taxes.

Although only the natives pay for prescriptions, which is insane.

I gotta say every time I hear about medical bills in the States I am glad I am a poor postsecondary student in Canada! I even get my prescriptions paid for…

In norway where i live, pretty much everything is covered except very very small charge on $50-100 and maybe extra 50 or so if you need do additional tests to cover medical supplies, also, insurance here is insurance everywhere and with every medical/health person, so despite US of bloody A’s bitching about how they are so much better then others they sure have a crappy system for people who need help….

As an American visiting in Norway, who suddenly & unexpectedly (is there another way?) needed medical help I stand impressed at the Norwegian system. The cost for sewing most of my little finger back on was only 19 kroner. I have full use of the finger today. I didn’t pay extra for the doctor, the facilities were clean &, I felt, quite homey, & there was no wait in the emergency room.

A friend of mine here in the States had a similar accident (certainly not exactly, mine was worse) to mine & several thousands of dollars later she has less use of her finger than I do.

I think about this whenever I hear (or read) people debating ObamaCare & wonder why certain governors in certain states (Which I believe the artist of this strip live in one of those states) wish to deny their own people that level of coverage. These are usually the people who claim to be more Christian than the rest of us. (which is another rant, & I won’t go there.)

That’s one thing I can’t understand — why, in the US, people who are against universal healthcare think that they are on the moral high ground.

Jackie, I hope that your bill problems are sorted out.

I don’t have health insurance under the affordable care act for a good reason:

I can’t afford it.

Seriously. They even waived the tax penalty for not signing up for it when I did my taxes.

There’s a way to do universal healthcare properly, and then there’s Obamacare. It’s not the same thing. To have proper universal healthcare, we’d have to abolish health insurance. That will never happen in the US.

This. The ACA merely reinforces the crony capitalism that made health insurance the monster that people couldn’t afford to feed to begin with. Nothing was done about the underlying causes of why medical care was so expensive in the US to begin with; it’s just another layer of obfuscating inefficiency to extract maximum funds while providing as little service as possible.

Designed initially by a Republican, shoved down our throats by a Democrat.

I must say that, besides many problems, at least here in Brasil you can be treated for almost everything for free. But, the public hospitals are not nearly as fancy as the private ones. Non-urgent surgeries may be delayed for long, while emergencies are ok.

*Shrug* Yeah, it’s a shame porn is so lucrative.

As a dude who’s had the occasional hospital stay I totally get you, the Doctors with their own separate charges for miniscule things is positively ridiculous.

Also. I think I would actively avoid any club that would allow Reggie as a member.

If you want to take advantage of loopholes in the Tax code (which you really can’t do unless you have a personal lobbyist helping you make new tax laws for your special interest group) you’ll need to do an itemized deduction, which for 2015 will need to be more than $6,000. If you don’t have more than 6K in deductions you’ll be stuck w/ a standard deduction. Onto the Medical deductions! Being able to write off medical expenses you paid out of pocket is nigh impossible. You can only claim medical expenses that exceed 10% of your AGI (adjusted gross income) I.E. if you make 25,000 in 2015 you can only claim medical expenses if they were more than $2,500 and you only get to claim what is in excess (that first 2,500? too bad so sad)

Bottom line, in the States you need medical insurance, and when you have it you need to go to a Hospital that accepts it and see a Doctor there who also accepts it, the two are not mutually exclusive. Think of Doctors/Radiologists/Anesthesiologists as subcontractors who work for the hospital (they wont all accept your insurance even if the hospital does.) If you don’t make much money there’s good news, you can likely get insurance for free through your state government. If you’re too prideful to take advantage of it, swallow that pride and get on that shit..your tax dollars are paying for it and the gov. sure as hell doesn’t give a shit if you aren’t taking advantage of the programs.

If a doctor tries to bill you for something that happened in the hospital, call the insurance company. Tell them that even though that doctor isn’t contracted with the insurance, they saw you in a hospital setting and that should be covered in the same manner as the hospital charges were.

Unless, of course, you don’t have insurance… (yikes)

Personally I’m wary of that free insurance for low-income families stuff. Way too many ways it screws you over in the fine print, like being able to recoup costs after your death by taking possession of your property.

I’ve been on U.S. government medical, and it’s not an experience I wish to repeat. The level of care I got was just below that of a Boy Scout’s first aid (I mean, they couldn’t even recognize gangrene as it oozed out of the wound! And one of them killed my unborn child because he didn’t believe my wife and I deserved to have it, then was protected from consequences by The System.)

I’m all for affordable health care. From what I’ve seen, we don’t even have health care.

I guess my point is that, in my experience the government is not part of the solution, it’s part of the problem.

Well, Kepler certainly knows how to bow out gracefully. How’s a slap and tickle behind the bleachers with the neighborhood pump at age 15 going to compare to Reggie’s story?

Oh, I feel your pain about the medical bills. I had an emergency appendectomy at the end of July and I still have bills coming in, from people I never even heard of. Pathology? For a freaking appendix? What, did they think it was cancerous? Sometimes I think I’m an ATM for the Medical community. That’s why they drive Mercedes and Lexus and you have a beat-up pickup.

That’s why it is called an industry and Obama Care is about insurance and not actual, you know, getting you the medical care you need. They are not there to make you healthy and happy. They are there to treat you and get the most money out of you that they can for doing as little as possible at their end just like every other corporate entity these days.

The problem is that we, in this country, go at medical care backwards. The solution seems, from what studies I’ve read & done of medicine in other countries & here, is some form of single-payer system where the patient is put first & the insurance companies are relegated to those who want some sort of special gold-plated treatment.

That’s not going to happen as long as there is money to be made from the surgery fodder out there, but it should.

Calculators used to cost nearly $100. Now you can get one for $1 (no, it’s not graphing). What happened? Competition. Allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines would introduce competition. In a capitalist system, you could buy an mri machine, hire some competent people to run it, charge less for scans than your competitors, and make money. It’s not unusual for a cash transaction on a medically related expense to be less than the copay with insurance. With “free” medical care, theres no reason to innovate or improve- it won’t make any more money. Also, I would like to see some reliable stats on how many people lost the insurance they had, had it become more expensive, or covered less versus how many people had no insurance who now not only have insurance, but affordable insurance.(And how much of a subsidy was required to make it “affordable”) Also, who’s going to go to the time, trouble, and expense of medical school to become a bureaucrat?

That right there is part of the problem – insurance should not even be part of the equation. People don’t need insurance, they need medical care.
You hit the nail on the head, even though it was a different nail XD.
Competition for supplying the medical services should be encouraged but it isn’t.
Here in Ontario they whine about the cost of OHIP and maybe dropping some services and prescription drugs off the list yet again, yet not once do they even touch on the high costs of drugs [patents into forever] and doctors who are in short supply supposedly [most graduates become specialists for the big$$$ and work part time].
There are qualified medical personal begging to come in and practice and are more willing to go through internship hell to prove themselves yet the incumbents insist on them going back to school starting from scratch and only allow a token handful of internships [between 6&10 last I heard].

The reason this fiasco cost me so much is because the current Administration’s wonderful healthcare initiative is such a disaster. It was deliberately designed to serve less than 100,000 individuals in a population of over 300,000,000.

I lost out because I actually work for a living. My employer’s insurance policies (we have our choice of two plans: Bad and Worse) fell into Mr. Obama’s definition of “Cadillac Plans,” meaning they would actually provide marginal coverage. We were penalized by having to reduce coverage and increase payments. Both plans also reduced the amount they would actually cover and increased member copay and shortfall expenses.

Another problem is the Healthcare system is seriously broken. In the late 1970s, some suit with an MBA instead of an MD decided that Healthcare should be a for-profit entity. The non-profit, essentially charity hospital where I was born in 1957 is now owned by a large, money grubbing Healthcare Corporation.

Even the ambulance I rode to the Hospital in was supposed to be part of the Town Fire Department, but they billed me $900 for an 8-mile ride. They’re part of a corporation, too, but you don’t see that until you get the bill.

47,000 dollars. Thats what I owed a hospital for keeping me for 2 days. I had 4 different doctors keep coming in to check up on “various concerns” and yeah. Utter and complete BS. I am still paying it back slowly, I figure that if I ever won the lottery some day, I’d be even more in debt just because I’d have to cover the bills+pay the taxes on that as well and I’d be totally sunk.

If John makes something up how would they know? He has a good enough read on the crowd to know what they want now.

The more decent artists that get over their prudishness the lesser the value of porn will be. You fulfill a vital roll in the supply and demand of the market place?

I’ve yet to hear a story of how the Patient Protection and “Affordable” Care act has actually helped someone afford medical care beyond getting them overpriced spotty insurance.

If they wanted to make health care affordable, the 885 pages that cover the insurance mandate (906 pages in all) should have been used to issue limits to how much certain things can be charged instead.

BTW, the first 12 pages are the summary, leaving 9 pages for the Patient Protection portion.

If you lived up here it would be a lot cheaper, though contrary to popular belief by many Americans it is not actually free, you still have to pay to visit the hospital

“I need to get over my prudishness and just draw porn. That’s where the money is.”I dunno. A lot of the pr0n artists on DeviantART and FurAffinity are crying poor-mouth and starting Patreon accounts to keep going. On the other hand, the days of free porn seem to be limited. The times, they are a changin’…

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