ACA Signups

Until October 2013, I wasn't a healthcare wonk. I wasn't an expert on the ACA specifically or health insurance in general. I didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground when it came to risk pools, cost sharing, deductibles, out of pocket caps, guaranteed issue, community rating or any of the other industry buzz words.

Hell, I didn't even know that Medicaid is the same program as California's Medi-Cal or Wisconsin's BadgerCare Plus (that's just how those states brand the program).

What I did know was that the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, which had been signed into law 3 1/2 years earlier, was a Big Fucking DealĀ®, as President Biden had put it...and I knew that the main provisions of the ACA were about to go into effect.

Ten days earlier, on the same day that the federal and state ACA exchanges had opened for business (with some of them, including the main one at HealthCare.Gov experiencing catastrophic technical failures), At the same time, Texas Senator Ted Cruz had spearheaded a federal government shutdown (sound familiar?) in protest of the new law.

Those first few weeks were pretty chaotic for the ACA, to put it mildly.

A few months back, like millions of other Twitter users after the platform was taken over by Elon Musk, I turned to the open source, federated social media platform Mastodon as an alternative. While Mastodon is definitely undergoing some growing pains, for the most part I'm pretty happy with it...so much so that I've actually signed on as a monthly Patreon supporter of the founder & primary instance administrator Eugen Rochko.

Unfortunately, last night I received an email notice which illustrated one of the key problems with Mastodon--a problem which, as it happens, is also at the core of Twitter's current woes: Content moderation policies & enforcement.

Here's the email I received:

Subject: Your posts on @charlesgaba@mastodon.social have been removed

Posts removed

A bit off-topic but with good reason.

Just wanted to let my supporters know that while I can still be found on Twitter (at least as of this writing), I've also set up shop at Mastodon. I have an account at Post as well, but Mastodon seems to be the most Twitter-like social media experience for me, and it being decentralized means that no Musk-type can ever take it over.

Anyway, I've added a link to both my Mastodon and Post accounts to the sidebar as well as below. I've also added a "quick-link" icon button to post blog entries on Mastodon.

Advertisement