Author: Lance Garrison
Your health insurance plan includes a list called a formulary — a directory of the drugs it covers. If you’ve ever been stunned at how much it cost you to fill a prescription, it’s possible that medication wasn’t on your formulary.The formulary is also called a preferred drug list (PDL). At first glance, you may think you need a decoder ring to figure it out. But understanding your PDL can help you pay the lowest price for the drugs you need.Make Sense of Your Drug FormularyYour plan’s list is created by a committee made up of doctors and pharmacists. The…
For many in Vermont, the horror of a shooting of Palestinians was compounded by the violation of the state’s self-image as a uniquely welcoming place.
Lately I have been asking people this question: Do you remember the first time someone informed you of your gender? It’s a nonsense question, of course. No one remembers. Mine was first declared to me, and everyone else involved, in the birthing room. Nowadays, for many people, gender is given to them well before they are born, and perhaps even heralded with cannons of pink or blue confetti at a gender reveal party. Maybe that’s what makes it seem so immutable? It’s an early, definitive declaration.As children, we are given many things — some are biologically inherited, like hair and…
As we head into COP28, the annual global meeting on climate change underway in Dubai, there are two dominating schools of thought, both of which are wrong. One says the future is hopeless and our grandchildren are doomed to suffer on a burning planet. The other says we’re all going to be fine because we already have everything we need to solve climate change.We’re not doomed, nor do we have all the solutions. What we do have is human ingenuity, our greatest asset. But to overcome climate change, we need rich individuals, companies and countries to step up to ensure…
Kissinger’s dirty work went far beyond Southeast Asia and South America. Along with Nixon, he backed the brutal effort of the military government of the former West Pakistan to suppress Bengali nationalists in the former East Pakistan, in what is now Bangladesh. A recent study estimated the death toll in that conflict at 269,000 people, with millions of refugees pushed into neighboring India. Kissinger also gave the green light to the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, sparking a conflict that would, between 1976 and 1980, go on to kill at least 100,000 people out of a total…
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.nicholas kristofI’m Nicholas Kristof. I’m a columnist for The New York Times. I went to Texas recently to visit two cities, Houston and Dallas. They’re both these big Democratic cities that had enormous problems with homelessness and both tried quite earnestly to address the problem. In Dallas, the problem got worse. It now has the largest number of unhoused people in all of Texas, while…
The 2024 election cannot be about the price of gas.
Donald Trump hasn’t talked much about policy in this election cycle, except for vague assertions that he’ll somehow bring back low unemployment and low inflation — which, by the way, has already happened. (Unemployment has been at or below 4 percent for almost two years. Thursday’s report on consumer spending showed the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation getting close to its 2 percent target.) Most of his energy seems to be devoted to the prospect of wreaking revenge on his political opponents, whom he promises to “root out” like “vermin.”Nonetheless, over the past few days, Trump has declared…
Nonprofit hospitals have been caught doing some surprising things, given how they are supposed to serve the public good in exchange for being exempt from federal, state and local taxes — exemptions that added up to $28 billion in 2020.Detailed media reports show them hounding poor patients for money, cutting nurse staffing too aggressively and giving preferential treatment to the rich over the poor. Nurses and other workers recently resorted to strikes to improve workplace safety at Kaiser Permanente and the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J.That’s not the end of it. Nonprofit executives have embarked on…
Mosquitos don’t just whine in your ear and drive you mad with itching. They also spread disease to more than 700 million people every year. Here’s how to stay off a mosquito’s menu. From zappers to catchers to candles to sprays, mosquito repellents come in many forms. Photo Credit: iStock/Getty Images Do you seem to get eaten alive when others are left alone? You’re probably not just imagining it.Everyone’s body chemistry is a little different, and some people are more likely to attract unwanted insect advances than others are.Mosquitoes can sense your presence from far away. When you breathe out,…