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People are sharing the weirdest things we accept as 'normal’ and it has people questioning reality

What will people say about us 50 years from now?

via Pexels

People living to work, not working to live.

If we looked 60 years into the past, there are a lot of things that were accepted as “normal” that today most people find abhorrent. For example, people used to smoke cigarettes everywhere. They’d light up in hospitals, schools and even churches.

People also used to litter like crazy. It’s socially unacceptable now, but if you lived in the ’70s and finished your meal at McDonald’s, you’d chuck your empty styrofoam container (remember those?) and soda cup right out of the window of your car and onto the street.


It’s hard to imagine that just 60 years ago spousal abuse was considered family business and wasn't the concern of law enforcement.

It makes me wonder when people in the future look back on the year 2022, which things will they see as barbaric? Almost certainly, the way we treat the animals we use for food will be seen as cruel. The racial divides in the criminal justice system will be seen as a moral abomination. And I’m sure that people will also look at our continued reliance on fossil fuels as a major mistake.

A Reddit user by the name u/MEMELORD_JESUS asked the AskReddit subforum “What’s the weirdest thing society accepts as normal?” and the responses exposed a lot of today’s practices that are worth questioning.

A lot of the responses revolved around American work ethic and how we are taught to live to work and not to work to live. We seem to always be chasing some magical reward that’s just around the corner instead of enjoying our everyday lives. “I’ll get to that when I retire,” we say and then don’t have the energy or the inclination to do so when the time comes.

There are also a lot of people who think that our healthcare system will be looked at with utter confusion by people in the future.

Here are 17 of the best responses to the question, “What’s the weirdest thing society accepts as normal?”

1. Work-life balance

"Working until you're old, greying, and broken then using whatever time you have left for all the things you wish you could have done when you were younger." — Excited_Avocado_8492

2. Rest in comfort

"That dead people need pillows in caskets." — Qfn4g02016

3. I.R.S. mystery

"Guessing how much you owe the IRS in taxes." — SheWentThruMyPhone

4. You get the leaders you deserve

"Politicians blatantly lying to the people. We accept it so readily, it's as though it's supposed to be that way." — BlackLetyterLies

5. The booze-drugs separation

"Alcohol is so normalized but drugs are not. It's so weird. I say this as an alcohol loving Belgian, beer is half of our culture and I'm proud of it too but like... that's fucking weird man." — onions_cutting_ninja

6. Stage-parent syndrome

"People having kids and trying to live their lives again through them, vicariously, forcing the kids to do things that the parents never got to do, even when the kids show no inclination, and even have an active dislike, for those things." — macaronsforeveryone

7. Priorities

"Living to work vs working to live." — Food-at-last

8. 'The Man' is everywhere

"Being on camera or recorded any time you are in public." — Existing-barely

9. Tragic positivity 

"'Feel-good' news stories about how a kid makes a lemonade stand or something to pay for her mom's cancer treatment because no one can afford healthcare in America." — GotaLuvit35

10. Credit score

"As a non-American, I am amazed at their credit score system. As a third-world citizen, credit cards are usually for rich (and slightly less rich) people who have more disposable money than the rest of us and could pay off their debt.

The way I see people on Reddit talk about it is strange and somewhat scary. Everyone should have a card of his own as soon as he becomes an adult, you should always buy things with it and pay back to actively build your score. You're basically doomed if you don't have a good score, and living your life peacefully without a card is not an option, and lastly, you'll be seen as an idiot if you know nothing about it." — BizarroCullen

11. The retirement trap

"Spending 5/7ths of your life waiting for 2/7ths of it to come. We hate like 70% of our life, how is that considered fine?" — Deltext3rity

12. Yes, yes and yes

"Child beauty pageants." — throwa_way682

13. That's not justice

"The rape of male prisoners. It's almost considered a part of the sentence. People love to joke about it all the time." — visicircle

14. Customers aren't employers

"Tipping culture in the US. Everyone thinks that it's totally OK for employers not to pay the employees, and the customers are expected to pay extra to pay the employees wages. I don't understand it." — Lysdexiic

15. Staring at your phone

"Having smartphones in our faces all day. This shit isn't normal...imma do it anyway...but it is not normal." — Off_Brand_Barbie_OBB

16. Homework on weekends

"Students being assigned homework over weekends and only having a two-day weekend. The whole point of a weekend is to take a break from life, and then you have one day to recover from sleep deprivation then one day to relax which you can’t because of thinking about the next day being Monday. And the two days still having work to do anyways." — MrPers0n3O

17. Kids on social media

"Children/young teens posting on social media sites. I’m not necessarily talking about posting on a private Instagram followed by friends, I’m talking about when kids post on tiktok publicly without parental consent." — thottxy


This article originally appeared on 03.11.22

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Family

Woman explains why having quadruplets resulted in a $4 million hospital bill

Here's how she paid the bill.

via Mikhail Nilov/Pexels

A man and woman looking over their bills. Representative image.

The United States is the second most expensive country in the world to give birth, after Japan. In Japan, it costs around $61,000 to have a vaginal delivery, although those costs can be offset by government health insurance.

In the U.S., it costs around $14,000 to have a child without insurance, although there are a lot of factors that affect the price, including where you give birth, the type of insurance you carry and if there are any complications.

While $14,000 is a lot of money for most people, Hanna Castle from the Columbus, Ohio, area received a $4 million hospital bill after having quadruplets and that didn’t even include the delivery. All 4 of the children needed to spend time in the NICU for lengths between 64 and 147 days.


Castle explained the costs in a video that has been seen nearly 8 million times.

That hurt 🤣 

@hannacastle

That hurt 🤣 #Quadruplets #nicu #america #healthcare

The 4 children, Atlas, Dominic, Magnolia and Morgan, were all born at 28 weeks via Cesarean section and were treated at separate NICUs. According to Investopedia, a stay in the NICU can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000 a day in the United States.

The smallest child of the 4, Atlas, weighed just 1.5 pounds but had the shortest stay in the NICU of 64 days. His total bill came to $714,747.15. Next was Magnolia who stayed 74 days at a cost of $728,625.56. Morgan stayed 86 days for $976,415.69 and Dominic stayed the longest, 147 days, for $1,626139.55.

All in all, the total bill for the NICU for the Castle Quads was $4,045,927.95.

Commenters on the video couldn’t believe how anyone could pay such a massive bill. "To put this in perspective, it would take $500 a month for 675 years to pay this off," Gouda wrote.

The good news for the Castle family was that Medicaid of Ohio picked up the entire tab. Knowing that the babies would need extensive care after being born, the couple quit their jobs to qualify for financial assistance. "At 16 weeks pregnant, I decided to quit my job to get some of that assistance because there was no other way," Castle told Good Morning America.

"I moved my mom in with us to kind of help financially for the first year and see how the kids were going to be,” she added. In Ohio, adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level and children with a household income of 211% of the poverty level can qualify for Medicaid.

In a recent Facebook post, Castle discussed the tough challenges of being the parent of multiples in America.

“You can believe that you’ll have 1 full-term child, but every pregnancy is different. A lot of us do not believe in terminating healthy children because of finances. Things happen. No one wants to live off of government assistance just to be able to survive and frankly there’s a lot of shame behind it,” she wrote. “But other countries don’t even have to worry about that. Do they truly think that a 1-time tax credit per year is enough to get us to keep having children in this economy? With the type of medical bills we rack up here? With the lack of financial medical assistance we have here?”


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Health

Most expensive fart ever. Woman shares massive hospital bill she got for having gas.

If you're going to have gas, you better have insurance.

via Will C. Fry/Flickr and Nataliya Vaitkevich/Pexels

A woman is blown away about the charge for her medical care.


Even though the number of uninsured Americans has been on the decline for over a decade, the cost of healthcare is still astronomical, especially if you are uninsured. A perfect example of this story was recently shared by TikToker Cinthanie McAllister, who told a hilarious story about a bill she got for having a nasty case of gas.

Obviously, high healthcare costs aren’t funny, but sometimes, a good laugh can make the pain a bit more bearable.

"I bet you didn't know that you wanted to know how much it costs to fart without insurance in an ER in the United States," McAllister starts her video from the kitchen.

"A little while ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most excruciating abdominal pain I have ever experienced in my life," she said while doing her best to hold back the laughter. "I was doubled over. I couldn't walk. I had to literally crawl across our bedroom floor to wake my husband up to get him to take me to the ER. They had to come out to the car and wheelchair me into the ER because I couldn't walk because I was in so much pain."

i have to laugh to keep from crying because this is insane

@cinthanie

i have to laugh to keep from crying because this is insane #storytime #ervisitstorytime #emergencyroom #fyp

The pain was so severe that healthcare workers tried to give her morphine for relief. But McAllister didn't want any. "I was like, 'No! I don't want any f*cking morphine; I just want to know what's wrong with me.'"

The staff had McCallister take a CT scan because they were concerned, as were the McAllisters, that she may have a ruptured appendix. If not, then why would she be in such terrible pain?

While she was waiting for the scan results, nature called and McAllister went into the restroom. It was there she realized what was causing all of the abdominal distress.

"I let out the world's fattest ripper you've ever heard in your life," she said, trying to keep it together. "It was so ungodly smelling. It was so unwomanly. It was so wretched. Like, I'm positive that if there were bugs in the walls in that hospital, they were bug-bombed out. It was so f*cking bad."

"Anyways, needless to say, after letting out the world's biggest ripper, I felt pretty good," she admitted. "They ruled it as gastrointestinitis. The CT scan came back clear and they sent me on my way with some suppositories."

"How much do you think it cost me to let out that fart in the ER with no insurance? I'm telling you right now, you're wrong. It's more. It's more than what you think," she says. "This fart cost me $8,621.10."

"The price of gas in this country is outrageous," Sarah Staten wrote. "Happened to me once… spent hours in the ER for the Dr to say I had a 'fart stuck sideways,'" D added.

Many people gave her advice on how to avoid paying the bill.

"Get an itemized bill and tell them you are a cash patient. That should cut it in half or more. Then, just tell them you’ll make payments. Send them $20 a month. They’ll take it and do nothing," SeaChelleAviatrix suggested.

Upworthy has contacted McAllister for comment and has yet to receive a response.

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Health

The percentage of Americans without healthcare coverage has hit an all-time low

The uninsured rate has been cut in half since 2010.

Photo via -ted/Flickr

The health insurance reform bus tour, 2009.

At a time when it can feel like America's most pressing problems aren’t being addressed, there’s some very good news on the healthcare front that everyone should know. The percentage of Americans who are uninsured has hit the lowest point in American history.

A report from the Office of Health Policy earlier this year announced that the uninsured rate hit an all-time low of 8% in the first quarter of 2022. To give some perspective, in 2010, before the Affordable Care Act (ACAalso known as Obamacare) had been fully implemented, the uninsured rate was twice as high at 16%.

To add to the drop in the number of uninsured, more Americans have purchased health insurance during the recent Open Enrollment Period through HealthCare.gov and state-based marketplaces than ever before.

“The historic 13.6 million people who have enrolled in a health insurance plan so far this period shows that the demand and need for affordable health care remains high,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

A major reason for the increase in healthcare coverage has been the American Rescue Plan’s enhanced marketplace subsidies, state Medicaid expansions and an increase in enrollment outreach by the current administration.

Health insurance

The uninsured rate has dropped since the ACA passed.

via Office of Health Policy

Approximately 5.2 million Americans have gained health coverage since 2020. The new numbers were cause for celebration at the White House.

“From November 1st to December 15th, nearly 11.5 million Americans signed up for insurance on HealthCare.gov—about 1.8 million more people, an 18 percent increase, over the same period last year,” President Biden said in a statement. “That’s an all-time record, with enrollment still open and not counting people who have signed up for coverage through their state marketplaces. Gains like these helped us drive down the uninsured rate to eight percent earlier this year, its lowest level in history.”

Health insurance, doctors

​The ACA has gained popularity in the US.

via Pixabay

The drop in the uninsured rate is a great example of the benefits of smart policy-making in Washington. The ACA wasn’t the most popular piece of legislation when it was passed in 2010. Critics on the right demonized it as a state takeover of healthcare that would result in death panels, sky-high premiums and socialized medicine. Many on the far left thought that the ACA was bad policy because it stopped short of offering full coverage for everyone like Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal.

But over time, the ACA has become a cornerstone in American healthcare policy that has changed the lives of millions. Former President Barack Obama knew it wasn’t perfect when it was passed, but he saw it as a strong foundation to build on. Now his Democratic predecessor has done just that and we’re seeing the results.

The American public has developed a much more favorable view of the ACA since the GOP’s 2017 crusade to “repeal and replace” the bill that failed in Congress. Now, 55% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the bill versus 42% who disapprove.

“I think it’s probably here to stay,” Republican senator John Cornyn recently told NBC News, referring to the ACA.

The numbers for healthcare sign-ups during this Open Enrollment Period are definitely encouraging but things may get even better. This year’s HealthCare.gov Open Enrollment Period has been extended until January 15, 2022

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