You're also paying for the care of the homeless, disabled, mentally ill, and otherwise impoverished in the least efficient way possible.

EMTALA and other regulations mean they're not able to be turned away from an emergency room without at least an evaluation, and they're not able to be refused care for an immediately life threatening condition. There's even regulations at the federal and state levels that determine whether or not they have to be admitted or transferred to higher levels of care or better equipped hospitals. And there's similar stuff that applies to first responders. So you're not gonna ask someone about their insurance or go through their pockets for a card before initiating treatment. Most people would agree with this because at even the most basic level they understand that you can't wait for that to start something like CPR, even if they don't have enough empathy to think about how fucked up it would be in general to negotiate financial matters when a person is actively dying or to just discontinue CPR when you find out they don't have insurance. Also what if you make a billing mistake and abort lifesaving care you weren't supposed to? You can't bring them back to life. We'd have to degenerate to some pretty deep lows of empathy to start tolerating that kind of thing although I suppose we're already at levels of degeneracy that shock me.

But this also means that someone with diabetes or heart disease who can't afford regular outpatient doctor's visits is at best utilizing an expensive ER for primary care. At the worst they're using the ER for repeated expensive emergency treatments when regular outpatient primary care would be much cheaper and more efficient. So instead of getting insulin or antidiabetics like metformin (which are both old as shit and cheap to produce by now) they're getting IV fluids and medications and intensive monitoring of those therapies. This is also clogging up the ERs so they don't have the resources to handle genuinely unexpected accidents and other sudden illnesses.

If they can't afford a regular doctor, how do people think they're paying that ER bill? Many hospitals offer financial aid, but where's that money coming from? And when they just don't pay at all, who's paying for those supplies and wages? They can't get repo'ed so the bill just goes to collections where it also never gets paid. It might get bought at a lower rate by a debt collection company but ultimately the hospital is just eating at least part of the cost and and compensating by charging the people who can pay more.

So we could be paying for people's daily oral medications and other treatments that are relatively speaking cheap, but on top of that, these repeated crises are also making these people even less able to afford their care over time. When you chop off a minimum wage workers legs from diabetes related gangrene, they're not going to go back to a physically intensive job. They might be able to do a call center job but they're probably also collecting trauma and other mental illnesses too. They're lucky if their trauma and the constant mental and physical demands of a low wage job haven't resulted in some kind of substance abuse. They might also be tearing apart their muscles joints and ligaments with repetitive stress injuries that eventually build up to untreatable levels.

So yeah, you're already paying for other people's care, you're just doing it in the most expensive way possible. And that argument is also assuming you're a sociopath who doesn't already care that it's horribly inhumane.

Man this takes me back to highschool

Most girls I see with big curly (or other textured) hair use wraps or bonnets of some kind, usually silk. It does usually have a snug elastic band around the forehead, backs of the ears, and nape of the neck, but the top that holds the actual hair is usually looser and flowy. Another option is to contain the hair in a silk scarf wrapped in some sort of elaborate layered wrap system that you can either look up on YouTube or possibly go learn from a black or other curl / texture specializing hairdresser. If you're looking for something more masculine, black men usually call it a do-rag, or you could get a bonnet that is in a darker more subdued color and side profile.

In either case you would have to accept that big textured hair does demand somewhat counter-cultural styles just for practical reasons; there's a lot of stigma around them, at least in the states. I work in an institutional setting in a predominately black area and one of the more twisted bits of US irony is that we institutionalize black and other non-white people more often, then don't stock the hair products they need, then send them to court looking a fucking mess.

We had a really really beautiful success / recovery story this week after I had an utterly hellish experience with the same patient the previous week and I was reflecting that I really live for those moments because it can be otherwise difficult to justify my role in this system, and I work in the nicer mental health half now, not the completely fucked correctional end. Sorry for the tangent, I've had some pretty big emotional highs and lows of late.

Symbolism was the point of the paper straw thing to begin with. We won't see a reduction in single-use plastics until we get rid of the entire mindset of convenience culture. Plastics make it possible get the exact flavor of corn chips you like from gas station a state away from where you live at 2am. Plastics mean that flavor that only 2% of that local population like or would ever buy can wait on that shelf for 3 months until you're craving it on a road trip. That entire way of thinking would have to be dismantled, and they need to fight us on this one little symbol to keep us from having that discussion.

Also to add: there are a bunch of applications we should be using plastics for. It's a great material with some very unique properties that make it indispensable for certain applications. A great example a lot of people use actually specifically on the topic of straws is people with reduced mobility. Plastic bendable straws can give them a lot of independence in the process of feeding themselves and staying hydrated. Personally in my nursing practice, I specialize in the management of patients at high risk of violent behavior, and every time I show up to a code on another floor one of the first things I check for is that the patient's meals are getting served on a "safety tray" which is where everything is made of flimsy plastic and Styrofoam so they can't stab their care staff, wallop them over the head with the tray, or use the bowls as projectile weapons. Plastics are actually super handy, but getting rid of convenience culture would allow us to reserve them for the things they're actually needed for.

no such thing when you grow up fundie, LOL. So glad I knew what birth control was and a sketchy man looked like on my own from internet research. I went full blown HOE the second I got the chance and that could've gone a lot worse if I hadn't had the knowledge to keep myself safe because my parents sure as hell weren't gonna teach me.

I am familiar with places that have both of those things stocked in the work area; in fact I've seen that brand of syrup packets in particular.

.....what does homie do for work? You might be snitching.