All Muslims in China qualify for asylum, but we won’t pick them up?

Closing out 2024 with the most transformational trend of the year: immigration.

“Chinese Muslims, After Finding a Refuge in Queens, Now Fear Trump” (New York Times, today):

Then they managed to get out of China and reached the soil of the United States, many by trekking through the brutal jungle in Panama known as the Darién Gap on their way to the U.S. southern border.

They are Hui Muslims, a state-recognized ethnic minority group in China, where the government is determined to crack down on Islam.

Deportation could mean years in jail or labor camps.

Of the roughly 25 million Muslims in China, 11 million are Hui…

Most Chinese migrants entering the United States from the southern border are released on parole by immigration authorities. Then they can apply for asylum.

Simply being Muslim in China qualifies a migrant for asylum here in the U.S. (if that were not true, the people described in the article wouldn’t be “released on parole”, assuming that our laws and regulations are being enforced). But we won’t negotiate with the Chinese to arrange an airlift via Airbus A380 of all of the Chinese Muslims who wish to take up their birthrate of American citizenship.

The NYT describes the hardship of being a Muslim migrant to the U.S., even without Trump having resumed his dictatorship:

But Mr. Ma, the founder of the shelter, said Muslim migrants faced obstacles in making lives in America. Pork dishes, which many Muslims don’t eat, feature heavily in most Chinese restaurants.

Here’s someone who has two reasons for needing asylum:

“My mother told me to stay here,” said Yan, a single mother who came to the United States in July with her 10-year-old son, Masoud, through the Darién Gap. “‘If you come back,’” she quoted her own mother as saying, “‘there’ll be no good outcome for you. Who knows — they might even sentence you to life imprisonment.’”

“It would be lying if anyone says they are not scared,” said Yan, the single mother. “Everyone is on edge.” She said she would accept being deported but would make the painful decision to have someone adopt her son, who has problems learning, if it meant he could stay in the United States.

“My son has to stay here,” she said. “Going back would mean no chance of survival for him.”

We’re informed by the New York Times that is de facto illegal to be Muslim in China. As far as I know, it is de jure illegal to be a “single mother” in China (a pregnant person who chooses to have a child outside of marriage is not entitled to avail him/her/zir/theirself of state services, such as free schools and free health care; certainly there is no way to make a profit by having a baby without being married (the American Way)).

Every time I look at an article like this I’m more confused. Why do people have to walk to the U.S. in order to be eligible for U.S. residence/citizenship? If the abuse/danger level is the same, why is a person with the financial means and health required to do the walk more entitled to live here than someone who does not have these advantages?

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Could the U.S. build enough nerd factories to replace H-1Bs?

There’s currently a debate about whether mediocre nerds should be imported into the U.S. via H-1B or only supernerds, perhaps via the O-1 visa (both of these are “nonimmigrant” visas and yet everyone who gets one seems to end up as a permanent immigrant to the United States). The main argument supporting a massive annual influx of nerds is that Americans cannot and will not do nerd work, just as Americans cannot and will not do any hard work, which is why we need a border open to low-skill undocumented migrants.

Could the U.S. grow its own nerd supply based on native-born Americans? As it turns out, I have some experience in this area! About 25 years ago, I started “ArsDigita University”, a post-baccalaureate program in which people who had non-nerd degrees could take all of the core undergrad computer science classes in a TA-supervised cooperative open office-style environment. People just had to show up for 9-5 every day for a year and they’d come out knowing pretty much everything that a standard CS bachelor’s degree holder would know. Not a “coding camp”, in other words, but traditional CS knowledge. The big differences compared to a traditional university were (1) take one course at a time, and (2) do all of the work together in one room so that it would be easy to get help from another student or a TA.

Did it work? We ran it for just one year, but as far as I know everyone who completed the program got the kind of job that someone graduating with a CS bachelor’s would get.

As loyal readers may be aware, I’ve long been a critic of the traditional four-year college/university. Simply getting rid of summer and winter breaks would reduce the time required to get a degree and begin a career to 2.5 years. 18-20-year-olds are blessed with tremendous health and energy and shouldn’t need to take nearly half the year off. Here are some examples of my previous criticisms:

If we’re going to cut back on H-1Bs, though, we might need to get a little more radical. Following the lead of the Germans/Swiss, we should try to set things up so that a high-school graduate is ready to begin work in the tech mines as an apprentice nerdlet. We can have some demanding career-oriented classes for smart kids where the goal is not to get into college, but instead to get a job at age 18 and continue to develop skills that are obtained via certificate programs with independently administered exams. These would be like the current Microsoft and Cisco certification programs, but with a much broader array of options, e.g., for having learned physics, math, data science, machine learning, etc. to various levels (Coursera maybe already does this). These certifications could also help older workers who’ve maintained their skills. Instead of showing an employer a 35-year-old transcript as evidence that physics and engineering classes were taken, an applicant could show the employer 6-month-old certifications that physics and engineering are currently understood.

I’m not sure what the argument, from an employer’s point of view, for the traditional 4-year-old college experience is. For the lucky kids who get to attend a top-100 school, it’s obviously great fun to hang out with friends, attend football games, have sex with a lot of different partners, and occasionally study. But how do these experiences make a person a more effective worker? I think the answer is “generally, they don’t”. One of my former neighbors in Maskachusetts spent about $1 million on private school and college for a child who is now working as a receptionist for an HVAC company in a city that is notable for its rich concentration of marijuana and meth stores. Plainly this is something that the girl could have done just as easily on graduation from high school, consistent with the book Academically Adrift:

At the heart of the book is an analysis of data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which requires students to synthesize data from various sources and write up a report with a recommendation. It turns out that attending college is a very inefficient way to improve one’s performance at this kind of task. After three semesters, the average college student’s score improved by 0.18 standard deviation or seven percentile points (e.g., the sophomore if sent back into the freshman pool would have risen from the 50th to the 57th percentile). After four years, the seniors had a 0.5 standard deviation improvement over the freshman, compared to 1 standard deviation in the 1980s.

(See also Higher Education?)

Readers: Do you think employers could be talked down from H-1B and convinced to hire American 18-year-olds as apprentices who’d spend their evenings taking in-person or online classes in advanced nerdism?

Separately, I’d love to know how COBOL-coding nerds and beautiful fashion models got lumped together:

“The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability

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Disflation of 14 percent

Email received earlier this month about a price increase that begins today:

We are informed that we live in an era of “disinflation” (see for example, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman in the NYT, 2023: “How (Many) Economists Missed the Big Disinflation”). I guess disinflation doesn’t preclude disflation (inflation in the cost of whatever Disney is selling).

Now that the election is behind us, the New York Times is writing that inflation and crime are both raging in New York City. “My Restaurant Was Named One of New York City’s Best. Here’s Why It Closed.” (NYT, Dec 28, 2024): “The combination of inflation, rising crime that required us to pay for security guards and declining profits simply proved insurmountable.”

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Jimmy Carter’s pioneering support for Hamas

Jimmy Carter died today, aged 100. He is most associated in Americans’ mind with raging inflation (unfairly, I think, since it was Lyndon Johnson who indulged in a massive expansion of both the welfare state (Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, taxpayer-funding housing) and the U.S. role in the Vietnam War) and impotence against powerful Islamic foes, e.g., the Iranian Muslims who took Americans hostage in Tehran.

Let’s look at an area where Jimmy Carter was temporarily out in front of fellow Democrats: support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”).

In 2006, Carter was on the ground monitoring the election in which Palestinians voted Hamas into power (Hamas should legitimately be the ruler of the West Bank as well as Gaza, but that’s a longer story). Trip report:

On election day, Rosalynn and I visited 25 polling sites, in East Jerusalem and its outskirts, Hebron, Ramallah, and Jericho. It seemed obvious to us and other observers that the election was orderly and peaceful and that there was a clear preference for Hamas candidates even in historically strong Fatah communities. Even so, we were all surprised at the enormity of the Hamas victory.

(Note the incorrect-for-traditionalists use of the word “enormity” to describe something large.)

In 2006, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled “Don’t Punish the Palestinians”:

The election of Hamas candidates cannot adversely affect genuine peace talks … even if Hamas does not soon take the ultimately inevitable steps of renouncing violence and recognizing Israel’s right to exist.

It’s comforting to know that Hamas will inevitably renounce violence (when they run out of ammo?).

2009: “first of all Hamas has to be accepted by the international community as a legitimate player in the future, and that is what I am trying to do today.” (New York Times)

2014: “Ending this war in Gaza begins with recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political actor.” (Foreign Policy); see also USA Today: “Jimmy Carter calls for recognizing terror group Hamas”

2015: “Carter says Hamas leader committed to peace, Netanyahu not” (Times of Israel): “I don’t believe that he’s a terrorist. He’s strongly in favor of the peace process,” Carter said of Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. (Wikipedia regarding the same noble peace-lover: “On 3 September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges against Mashal for allegedly orchestrating the 7 October attack on Israel”)

From 2007 by Alan Dershowitz, who joined Harvard prior to the institution’s conversion to Queers for Palestine:

By 2021, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and whoever was actually running the U.S. had come to see things Jimmy Carter’s way. “Reversing Trump, Biden Restores Aid to Palestinians” (NYT):

The move will once again make the United States a leading donor to the United Nations agency that assists about 5.7 million Palestinians in the Middle East.

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it would restore hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid to Palestinians, its strongest move yet to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s policy on the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The restoration of aid amounted to the most direct repudiation so far of Mr. Trump’s tilt toward Israel in its decades-old conflict with the Palestinian population in Israeli-controlled territories.

In other words, via the implementation of Carter’s 15-year-old ideas U.S. taxpayers fully funded the October 7, 2023 attacks against Israel (we gave the Gazans hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years, enabling men to refrain from working to put food on their families’ tables, thus freeing them to spend full time on military training).

How did Carter’s pro-Hamas sentiments turn into Queers for Palestine? “Jimmy Carter: ‘I believe that Jesus would approve of gay marriage’” (The Hill, 2018).

(Jesus is quoted by Matthew as saying that “sexual immorality” happens because of “evil thoughts”. A man having sex with another man was proscribed as “an abomination” by Leviticus and Jesus never promulgated a substitute set of regulations for sex acts. I wonder what would happen if we could get into a time machine and go back to Jerusalem in AD 30, show Jesus videos of modern 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyles (including, of course, the bathhouse!), and then ask him to bless/approve of these activities.)

Loosely related, a bit more about Carter’s theology (Forward):

Carter continued to teach Bible classes, later released in audiobook form. During one, he stated that Jesus “directly challenged in a fatal way the existing church, and there was no possible way for the Jewish leaders to avoid the challenge. So they decided to kill Jesus.”
Carter reiterated this calumny of Jews as Christ-killers, the basis for centuries of antisemitic persecution, in yet another Sunday school lesson about how Jesus was aware that he was risking death “as quickly as [it] could be arranged by the Jewish leaders, who were very powerful.”

Thus contradicts what the PhDs in religion say, e.g., from Frank K. Flinn, professor at Washington University in St. Louis (source):

Romans killed Jesus as a political threat, as they had killed many other prophets, brigands, rebels during the first century. Josephus the Jewish historian recounts many examples in his Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. Had the Jewish authorities been directly involved, Jesus would have been stoned, as Stephen was in Acts 7. Only Roman authorities could authorize crucifixions and they often did so on a gruesome, massive scale.

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Working class taxpayers buy a laptop class Coloradan a free electric car

“How I Leased a New EV for $0 Down and $0 per Month” (Car and Driver, December 2024):

During my morning scroll, I came upon news of a Denver dealer offering a Fiat 500e lease for $0 down and $0 a month. The minimal fine print said lessees had to be Colorado residents, which I am, and just had to cover the tax on this wee EV. I had to check it out.

The magic of this deal comes down to incentives. Because it’s a leased EV with an MSRP below $55,000, the car qualifies for the full $7500 federal tax credit regardless of battery mineral content or origin. Or rather, the leasing company qualifies for that credit, so the lessee’s personal income is irrelevant. This is the so-called leasing loophole. Colorado adds its own spiffs in the form of $5000 for a new EV, plug-in, or hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle, plus $600 if the vehicle is being financed or leased and an additional $2500 for cars with a sub-$35,000 MSRP. (The model eligible for this deal limbos under that bar at $34,095.) The $5000 state tax break ratchets down to $3500 on January 1, which is why the deal has a deadline of December 31, 2024. Uncertainty about the next administration’s stance on (non-Tesla) EVs provides a push, too.

All together, that’s $16,100 in credits, knocking the capitalized cost of the lease down to $17,995. I’d be on the hook for 4.5 percent tax on the original $34,095, but additional dealer-side coupons from Stellantis brought that down to $1205.50. If I choose to buy the car at the end of the term, it will cost me $17,388.45. I don’t expect that to happen.

Our family is in the laptop class. Could we get the working class to buy us a free car for use in Florida? No.

Because of Colorado’s unique tax-credit situation, the store rounded up as many unsold 2024s as it could find from across the country and slapped the deal on them. The car I ended up with was, coincidentally, originally delivered to the Fiat dealer down the road from C/D HQ in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I used to live.

Maybe a working class person behind on his/her/zir/their rent could get this deal too? No. It’s restricted to the “reasonably elite”:

A funny formality: They still had to run a credit check to confirm my ability to (not) pay.

Was that the end of the river of cash for the happy journalist?

I get my choice between a free Level 2 home charging station or $600 in charging credits, either of which will offset about half of my initial outlay. I opted for the hardware since I don’t plan to stray too far from home with this little Italian job. There’s also the incremental cost of adding a car to insurance as well as registration and plates, but you can’t get around those. So all in all, I’m paying less than $50 per month in taxes. Not bad.

(The “taxes” described might be more properly considered a user fee for the roads on which the car will be driven.)

What about your range anxiety? Load up on Xanax! From the Fiat USA web site:

I.e., the taxpayer-funded deal makes sense only for those rich enough to already own a long-range electric or gasoline-powered car. It transfers money from people who can barely afford one car to those who can afford to keep at least two. Merry Christmas to the elites, indeed!

Donald Trump, 2014: “I hope we never find life on another planet because if we do there’s no doubt that the United States will start sending them money!”

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There is no quota and we have not met the quota (US Naval Academy’s race-based admissions system)

“Federal Judge Upholds Racial Preferences in Naval Academy Admissions” (New York Times, December 6, 2024):

A federal judge on Friday denied an effort to stop the U.S. Naval Academy from considering race and ethnicity in admissions, finding that the academy has a distinct interest in using affirmative action to achieve diversity in its student body, and that doing so is a matter of national security.

Judge Bennett said in his decision that 52 percent of enlisted Navy service members belong to racial minority groups, but only 31 percent of officers do. In 2020, only about 17 of the 218 admirals in the Navy were officers of color, he said.

In the Marine Corps, the least diverse branch of the armed services, minority service members make up 35 percent of enlisted Marines, and 29 percent of officers, the judge said.

“There is a significant deficiency in the number of officers of color in the officer corps of the Navy and Marine Corps,” he wrote.

Racial quotas are unconstitutional violations of the 14th Amendment, so there certainly wouldn’t be a quota for “officers of color”. On the other hand, it is clear that the quota hasn’t been met (“significant deficiency in the number”).

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The New York Times says that low-skill migrants generate homelessness for the native-born

Without noting that this contradicts everything that they’ve been telling Americans for 20 years, the New York Times suddenly says that bringing in welfare-dependent low-skill migrants exacerbates homelessness among native-born Americans (full article):

What will happen next in this New Age of Wonders? Will the NYT tell us that buying an electric car won’t reduce CO2 emissions from India and China? That Kamala Harris’s laughter/joy in situations that appeared to call for neither was not a sign of hypercompetence and fitness for high office but instead a sign of dementia, consistent with “Observing conversational laughter in frontotemporal dementia” (J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry; 2017)?

Speaking of immigration and Indians, here’s a highly Deplorable tweet on the subject of reducing H-1B “nonimmigrant” visas (that somehow produce a huge number of permanent immigrants to the U.S.):

also

Elon Musk now says that he wants only the top 0.1% of engineering talent as H-1B-style migrants (tweet). But how could this be implemented with the bureaucrats that we have? What stops 100 percent of potential migrants from writing down on their applications that they scored in the top 0.1% of an exam that Americans have no way to verify?

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  • “PhD dropout to OnlyFans model” (YouTube video from Zara Dar, holder of a Master’s in Computer Science from University of Texas-Austin; she’ll need to be replaced in the tech workforce)
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Harvard considers housing affordability from all angles… except immigration and population growth

“Home Unaffordable Home” (Harvard Magazine, Nov-Dec 2024, remarkably un-paywalled) is an interesting window into the minds of the elite.

If present trends continue, nearly every American will become eligible for taxpayer-subsidized housing (not “welfare”, certainly!):

In many metropolitan areas, the annual income required to afford the median-priced home exceeds $150,000, about double the national median income of $75,000. Among renters, the number of cost-burdened households—those spending more than 30 percent of income on housing and utilities—in 2022 hit a record high of about 22 million, of which middle-income households represent an increasing share. Rental assistance, reserved for the lowest-income households, cannot keep up with demand: between 2001 and 2021, the number of assisted households increased by 0.9 million, while the number of income-eligible renter households rose by more than 4 million.

The “housing crisis” was intensified by Coronapanic:

The current housing crisis is broader than prior episodes, according to JCHS managing director Chris Herbert, Ph.D. ’97, who says, “For many years, housing affordability was really a problem of the poor.” Even when home mortgages became unaffordable for moderate-income earners—for example, as interest rates rose into the double digits in the early 1980s—rents did not rise in lockstep. The same was true during the housing bubble of 2006 and 2007: rents remained affordable, and home purchases by would-be first-time buyers could be deferred until the cost of borrowing moderated.

But after the Great Recession that began in 2008, he says, “Rents started to grow astronomically, faster than incomes, and we went from about 39 percent of renters cost-burdened in 2000 to 50 percent in the early 2020s.” In high-cost cities such as Boston, Washington, and San Francisco, people working year-round at decent jobs—making perhaps $50,000 a year—could no longer find a place to live that fit within their budget. Initially, says Herbert, this broadening of unaffordability into the ranks of the middle class was confined to rental properties. Homeownership remained within reach thanks to historically low mortgage interest rates.

During the pandemic, though, both housing prices and rents spiked. “We had an enormous demand for housing,” he notes, “and people weren’t spending money on anything else. Home became all-important.” Interest rates were low, and twenty-somethings who had been renting with roommates suddenly realized “they needed their own place to work from home.” They flooded into the market, pushing up prices of houses and apartments alike to new multiples of median income.

Could the problem be that U.S. population was 226 million in 1980 and it is now 338 million? (the growth is almost entirely because of low-skill immigration; native-born Americans can’t have big families because they can’t afford housing (see above) and they aren’t willing to pack 6 people into a 2BR apartment; see “Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History” (NYT), for example, regarding the Biden-Harris years) Harvard doesn’t consider this possibility. The words/phrases “immigration” and “population growth” don’t appear in the article.

Despite the fact that population growth isn’t mention, Harvard says that we need to learn to live like the Shanghainese and Israelis:

Adjusting for inflation, the cost to build a house today is about the same as it was 40 years ago. But inflation-adjusted prices have nearly doubled because there is not enough buildable land to satisfy demand. “We can’t make more land,” Herbert points out, “but we can make better use of it by increasing the density of housing…putting four units on a lot instead of one. So zoning reform gets a lot of attention as a means of increasing housing production.”

Can Harvard’s statement that housing isn’t more expensive to build be correct? My parents bought a brand-new three-bedroom house with central AC in the D.C. suburbs in June 1962 for about $15,990 (previous post). Adjusted to Bidies at official CPI, that’s about $167,000 today. If we assume that the land underneath the house was worth 15 percent of the total, the cost of building the house was no more than about $125,000 in 2024 Bidies (that would give the developer roughly 10 percent profit). I would love to see someone build a normal-sized house today, even to the lower 1962 standards, for $125,000, the price of a high-end car. (My parents could have bought a 4BR house for about the same size; see below.)

The same people who tell us that we need high minimum wages to keep the low-skilled peasants out of places such as Maskachusetts and California also say that we need cheap housing to bring them in:

“People used to move to higher-income states,” Glaeser continues. But middle-class migration stalls when housing becomes unaffordable. “The tragic part,” he says, “is that we’re both making America less productive—by not enabling people to move to places like Boston or Silicon Valley, which are among the most productive places in America—and ensuring that lower-skilled people, people who are less fortunate, can’t afford those places.” Denying them the economic opportunity afforded by mobility “just feels profoundly wrong,” he adds, “as well as being probably inefficient” (see “Immobile Labor,” January-February 2013). By excluding lower-paid workers from high-wage cities, the downstream effect of high housing costs is greater inequality.

Here’s a fascinating example of counterintuitive reasoning… a higher-density lifestyle has “downsides” for anyone living in a higher-density environment, but when every person’s local lifestyle is degraded by congestion the overall effect is everyone becoming better off.

Although additional restrictions render that [2021 California law trying to force cities to permit additional building on single-family lots] largely “toothless,” says economist Rebecca Diamond, Ph.D. ’13, state or regional legislation is probably the most effective means of addressing the housing crisis.

That, she explains, is because “the downsides of building more housing—in terms of congestion, too many kids in your schools, too many cars on your streets, and expanded infrastructure—are borne at the local level. But the benefits are diffuse. If you build more housing in Palo Alto,” continues Diamond, the Class of 1988 professor of economics at Stanford Business School, “it’s probably going to make housing prices a little bit cheaper in many parts of the Bay Area, not just in Palo Alto. So, Palo Alto gets all of the negatives, and only a tiny share of the benefits. Palo Alto has no incentive to build more housing.”

My personal opinion is that housing will continue to get more expensive relative to incomes as long as U.S. borders remain open. U.S. population is growing via the addition of people who don’t earn enough to fund the construction of new houses or apartments at present prices with present technology. The only thing that would bring down the cost of housing is, I think, a method of factory-producing houses that is dramatically cheaper than on-site construction (this has been the Holy Grail for a lot of developers for at least 75 years and it never seems to work on a large scale). A recent WSJ article says that the savings are only 5-10 percent, however, which isn’t enough to enable low-skill Americans to live in as-seen-on-TV homes.

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I’m Speaking puzzle for Kwanzaa

Found at the Palm Beach Gardens Barnes and Noble on this first day of Kwanzaa 2024:

Looks like one can also buy it on eBay.

Readers: How are you celebrating this important holiday?

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Another insured day in the U.S. health sector

At the intersection of our failed healthcare system (20% of GDP compared to 4% in Singapore) and United Healthcare…. Quest tried to charge our family $102.95 for a test. The fair price for this service was $5.86, their “negotiated rate” with United Healthcare. United paid nothing so Quest sent us a paper bill for $5.86, out of which they will have to pay about 55 cents for postage alone (a discount from the 73 cents that peasants pay for stamps).

The beauty of this system is that nobody questions why it starts with a vendor attempting to charge 17.5X the fair price.

Loosely related, a friend in Maskachusetts recently registered on the Quest web site for a pre-employment drug test:

I’m wondering what the lab technicians do with this information. Is there a “Genderqueer” setting on a Roche blood testing machine? “Additional gender category or other” reagents?

I paid the Quest bill, described above, as part of an biannual desktop clearing process. I found another bill. It was an X-ray for which $36 had been charged. United Healthcare’s price is $10.92 of which they paid… $0. So there was a paper bill for $10.92. Plus a second reminder bill, also for $10.92. Even if they’d gotten $10.92 via ACH from United Healthcare I don’t see how that enables the X-ray folks to keep the machine plugged in and the tech paid.

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