Kevin Johnson

Haste makes waste

2026-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

^^^

Aetna Reimburses 25% Less Than What They Claim

2025-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

tl;dr - Aetna says they’ll reimburse 140% of the “Medicare Allowable Rate” for out-of-network medical expenses. In my case they find that number and reduce it by 25%.

Let’s investigate the above statement regarding out-of-network medical reimbursement.

I normally wouldn’t take the time, but after being reimbursed what felt like the wrong number for months (but nearly close enough) I needed to do the math myself.

Let’s take a look at this claim:

“We pay for services based on your plan’s out-of-network rate for the location where you received it. That rate is 140% of the Medicare Allowable Rate“

Before we get to what the number actually is, let’s start with what they say it is:

Out-of-Network Claims

Going out-of-network and submitting claims follows a different logic than going in-network. When you go in-network you want a high “Plan Discount”. You want the amount you pay (what goes towards the deductible) to be low, because that’s what you owe.

However, in this case I’ve already paid the full amount ($205) for the service. There is no “Plan Discount” and they haven’t talked to my provider. This term used here is highly misleading. I’ve already paid and now want that amount to go towards my deductible.

When going out-of-network like this you want to hit your deductible as fast as possible. Once you’ve hit that, you want the amount subject to coinsurance to be as high as possible.

If you do the math ($205-$85.06) you end up with $119.94 which is what went to my deductible.

For 45 minutes of psychotherapy in Manhattan that’s sounding a bit low already (I paid $205 remember!). Let’s see what the government thinks you should pay and then apply Aetna’s 140% multiple.

Medicare Allowable Rate

On the cms.gov site at this URL for searching you can type in your HCPCS code (for the service) and MAC code (your location) and it will appear.

In my case, these values are:

90834 for the HCPCS code
1320201 for the MAC code

Here’s the search:

And here’s the result:

Result

Taking the non-facility price (in-office visit) of $114.23 and multiplying by 140% you end up with $159.92. This is the amount that should have gone to my deductible.

That’s already sounding much better! Less than what I actually paid, but better. Like a lower government number with a decent multiple applied.

When I called Aetna and spoke to a rep on the phone (today 5/8/2025) they confirmed the number I found. They said their internal system (for a publicly available number) also “calculated” that the reimbursement amount was exactly $159.92 down to the cent.

How could that be? The only excuse they managed to offer was “these rates change”. So maybe that explains the lower numbers in the previous claims?

However the number has been wrong every month in 2025 since February. And the wrong number has not changed ($119.94 has gone to my deductible for each appointment).

I’m also fairly certain the HCPCS codes change yearly (or possibly quarterly though that still wouldn’t explain this case). You can only search for them by year in the above link.

I think what changed was me calling with this information.

25% Reduction

If some group were interested in reimbursing a bit less, they may use the calculated number (the government number * the 140% multiple, which was $159.92) as a starting point.

Then, decide on some arbitrary percentage to reduce it by (let’s say an extremely obvious one, like 25%) to get a number that’s a bit lower, but close to the real one.

Let’s try doing that:

$159.92 * 0.75 = $119.94

What a strange coincidence! I almost wouldn’t believe it if the person on the phone didn’t confirm what I suspected the number should actually be. The adjustment was also done at a predictable percentage.

Result

So what will happen to the past claims? It didn’t sound like they would fix them.

I received a PDF in my email to write out and mail my complaint.

I didn’t receive any information that backs up the number they came up with.

It sounded like my submissions going forward will be fixed, but I received no confirmation of that either. Only a verbal confirmation the correct amount is what I found it to be.

Hopefully someone else reading this can save 25% on their out-of-network submissions with Aetna.

Caveat

I can’t see anything that says Aetna is required by law to pay 140% of the “Medicare Allowable Rate” for out-of-network medical claims.

I am simply investigating whether or not they actually stick to their own claims that they post publicly on their website.

wrblr

2023-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Why make a social media app in 2023. Why make anything? Is it to SHIP, scratch an itch, give the people something, prove someone wrong, make money? I don’t know but this is either the best cop out ever or something much deeper.

I started thinking about what this app would not be. No ads! No discovery! Wow you can save photos!

When you define yourself by what you’re not maybe it just ends up being derivative by default. I read somewhere that you shouldn’t approach new projects with this perspective but can’t remember where.

Do people use social media because they like it? Why would you make something people like? You should make something that can grow.

Maybe it is too derivate. Maybe the only way to approach social media is to think about growth first (I do enjoy these tweets). When you’re a developer making small things it’s tempting to think that you’re not going to succumb to that software engineer tunnel vision. Forever stuck in the editor.

That marketer who can come up with 50 push notifications to sell chairs a day is just built different. If I think that and a few other things are wrong how would I ever grow something on the internet quickly?

It’s not something entirely new, it’s just the old thing with the parts you don’t like taken out! Maybe this still works, maybe if I keep adding to it while not making it worse it works. But what is working? It’s hard not to think that social media is this zero-sum game where you either have the whole network or none.

Watching Threads “lose” to Twitter (or X) feels silly when you consider the amount of Threads-only users who are using what is basically the same app. They find it accessible because it’s packaged just a bit differently. I don’t think Tumblr got everyone, but they definitly got enough and were spreading some good taste and ideas.

Maybe that’s what this is on a smaller scale. A social media app in a small developer package. It’s still accessible, isn’t overwhelming, and (hopefully) looks good. Maybe it gets one of your friends to share a few photos you would never have gotten to seen without it.

~~wrblr.app~~

One Month Without Meat

2020-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

Last month was the longest I’ve gone without eating meat in my adult life. I’d gone days or a week (maybe) without eating meat, but this was the first time I went an entire month.

I’ve been interested in becoming a vegetarian for some time now for moral, environmental, and health reasons. It is much harder to say “today is the day I stop eating meat for the rest of my life” vs. “for the next 30 days I won’t be a meat-eater”. I’m not quite ready to commit all the way (thought I will still go plenty of days meat-free), but I know now that it is possible and even something I would not miss terribly. When thinking about quitting meat, or even giving up alcohol, I can’t get over the social connection that those activities can bring.

Bunk and McNulty bonding over a (meat-heavy) meal and drinks

During the beginning of the month I noticed after eating meals how much quicker the feeling of being full went away. By the time I was ready to eat the next meal I didn’t care what time it was, I was ready to eat right then. This was different than the usual sitting down at “dinner time” and thinking “I am sort of hungry”. Also throughout the whole month I never once got that feeling that so many of us get after a meal. You feel that you ate too much, become extremely tired, and your stomach feels like it’s going to burst. Even when eating a large vegetarian meal I never once got that uncomfortable full feeling. Anecdotally I feel that this overly full feeling may have something to do with eating meat.

I thought I would feel cravings for meat during this month, but this was not the case at all. Even someone who drinks alcohol casually knows (or maybe doesn’t know because they haven’t changed their drinking habits since they started) that when you take a break from drinking, these little cravings can start to pop into your head. This can be uncomfortable, because we don’t want to acknowledge this connection that has been developing in our brain since we started drinking alcohol, but it is there in some way for many people. I thought there could be some similar connection for eating meat, but I never once felt a craving for a steak, burger, or any type of meat dish that I previously enjoyed. I didn’t get to walk by a steakhouse or a BBQ restaurant (quarantine) but I imagine I would not have felt this strong pull to go inside. I think in the future this association of the “overly full” feeling with eating meat will discourage me even more.

One more thing to bring up that most people keep private: bowel movements! Maybe we should normalize talking about this more, I know some people actually like this topic but for me it seems a little taboo and not something to get into with strangers. Anyway, in previous months I would say I was a strictly 1 bowel movement per day person - in the morning, after drinking a cup of coffee. During the month I ate a vegetarian diet I had some days like this, but more frequently had days where it was 2-4 bowel movements a day. This was a pretty surprising change and it did not take too long for my body to get on this new rhythm. I had heard this before about eating a vegetarian diet but was skeptical about it being true. I am no longer a skeptic.

In the end I thought this was a great exercise and helped me realize that when I’m ready I can be a vegetarian full-time. I felt the same or better throughout the month, had plenty of energy, never felt like I got hit by a truck after a large meal, didn’t contribute to harming any animals, and had a smaller carbon footprint.

Marketplace Trust and Safety

2020-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Trust and safety is the most important aspect of any marketplace with the the least amount of innovation.

If you look at eBay, the classic online marketplace, what monumental inventions/protocols (like what RSA did for encryption) have arisen that could be applied to each transaction ensuring they go smoothly without fail? If the item passes inspection, the seller gets the money and the buyer gets the item promptly. If the item does not pass inspection, the transaction can’t take place.

Looking at eBay and other peer-to-peer marketplaces, they give you an approximation for the experience you’ll have with each person by having users leave feedback. This is generally reliable because honest people continue to act honestly and a smaller percentage of dishonest people are filtered out and banned after displaying their bad behavior. The problem is now keeping bad actors out, while validating good actors and adding digital gold stars to their reputation for people to rely on. There are also a few other systems that come into play like PayPal claims, requiring tracking information after purchase, etc. that attempt to shore things up.

Marketplaces

We don’t always think about it, but most transactions feel safe to us because of a middleman present. If we take a simplified example of physically depositing money at the bank, why do we feel safe doing that? Why do we trust that the teller is going to put that money into our account and not drop it in their wallet? Because we’re trusting that the bank has systems to keep their workers honest, and even if the teller did steal the money, we would require the bank to reimburse us. We require the bank to act as a good middelman and we (currently) have to put our trust somewhere.

A peer-to-peer marketplace has a completely different feeling because we are the ones taking on the risk (some places attempt to insure buyers, but usually buyers/sellers are interacting with surprisingly little between them). Internet marketplaces like StockX and Goat that address the clothing market try to take that risky feeling out by acting as a middleman. Adding a human middleman to a transaction is not a fullproof solution though. You’re taking the trust that buyers/sellers were placing in each other and moving it into another source that can still act poorly. There are terrible examples where just as much if not more damage was done to the users after the middleman made mistakes (Mt. Gox is a good example of this).

Going back to peer-to-peer marketplaces, let’s look at sellers where a feedback system has designated them trustworthy. They have 1000+ good reviews, gold stars, etc. Even though these are honest people, the transactions they enter into are still not designed in a way that ensures perfect outcomes. There will still be the odd bad transaction (item not in correct condition, late shipping, seller on vacation). They could even pull an exit scam and rip people off after building up a solid reputation before disappearing.

Removing the Human Factor

“Ride-sharing” companies seem to have decided that they will eliminate bad human behavior through driver automation. Most people view this automation as a way to reduce their labor costs (and it definitely is the #1 reason companies are pursuing self-driving). However, there is a positive benefit here because the chance for two strangers to do harm to one another has been removed (though you also lose positive interactions). People going home alone late at night won’t have to fear when the car picking them up doesn’t have a driver. I don’t want to imply it’s just drivers that are the bad actors here, passengers act terribly every single day (throwing up in cars, distracting the driver, being rude, lying to get ride refunds, etc.) and without the driver present there isn’t someone for them to act in opposition to.

Automating Online Marketplaces

Taking the solution from ride-sharing that I believe they will ultimately implement, how could this in theory be applied to an online marketplace? Perhaps we could imagine a closed warehouse where rows of machines await items from buyers. When they receive an item they could validate that it is authentic (one piece of this puzzle that some companies are already working on), rate it’s condition, wait until it’s purchased, then pack/label/ship the item to the buyer on the other end. This is a pretty large jump from what is currently happening online, but not dissimilar from the jump from human driven cars to driverless.

Conclusion

I do think automation has the chance to greatly reduce the harm people do to one another and is a benefit usually overshadowed by the negative impact it will have on the labor force. Unless other novel solutions arise, I see automation as the potential solution/middleman that will remove the risk factor and chance for people to behave poorly on marketplaces and in other contexts.

Homemade Solar Still - Part 1

2019-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

I first became interested in building a solar still after reading John Perlin’s excellent book Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy (the above image can be found on page 45 of the book). It’s a really amazing book, starting with solar homes in ancient China and going all the way to the invention of silicon solar cells.

There’s a great story in the book about Mària Telkes and the solar still/desalination unit she invented for downed airline pilots, stories about early attempts at solar power plants in the US (I had no idea this ever happened), and stories about people who had grand visions for solar products and the problems they ran into (energy storage, financing, cheaper fuel alternatives, etc.). Perlin has a great quote from Giambattista della Porta who said: “It is good husbandry, to rely on solar energy when ever possible, for the work is done without wood, or coals, or labor”. Interestingly enough, della Porta also imagined a gigantic solar mirror for setting enemy ships and gates on fire.

The solar still seemed like an accessible entry point for building a simple solar tool. My intended use for the still reflects the use in the picture, to distill a perfume (which I will write about in Part 2). From the same page, Perlin paraphrases Adam Lonicer’s instructions from 1561 on how this was done: “Certain types of flowers were submerged in a clear, water-filled vase, which was placed at the focal point of a spherical concave mirror. The concentrated solar heat caused the aromas of the flowers to diffuse into the water, and voilà, you had perfume”.

Original Guide

The guide I followed and will be walking through with my experience is this great article on instructables from several years ago.

Materials 🌞

1 gallon plastic/glass jar. I used this plastic jar, but if I started today would use this glass one as I’m trying to use less plastic. Both lids are plastic for cutting a circular hole in the top, I’d be interested to see a solution that avoids plastic altogether 🤔
1 insulating jar. I used this growler
1 glass collector. I used a regular 12 oz beer bottle (after drinking I washed and removed the label). Other small bottles with a cork sized mouth would work too
3/8” copper coil cut into a 24” - 32” length. I found this at my local Home Depot which had to be cut
3 square foot mirrors. I found mine at a local hardware store
Wood/cardboard backing for the mirrors + duct tape or other adhesive for mounting
2 corks. Mine were used, though the original guide mentions finding corks with pre-made holes at a wine-brewer hobby shop. I think these could be an online equivalent but I did not go that route

Steps

I started taping the square foot mirrors together along their edges and mounting them to my backing surface (cardboard in my case). I used the leftover cardboard from an Amazon order, but as the other guide mentions a sturdier setup can be achieved with a wood backing. The mirror component’s job is concentrating the sunlight onto the clear outer jar which contains the inner bottle with the distillation mixture.

The next step was cutting a circular hole in the outer jar’s lid for the opening of the inner bottle. This clear jar acts as a solar heat trap, letting in sunlight and trapping the energy it accumulates (like a mini-greenhouse) in order heat the inner bottle and cause the mixture to evaporate upward through the copper tubing (wiki - distillation). I cut the hole out using an X-Acto knife which was a little imperfect, there is probably a better way.

Next I took the two corks and proceeded to open 3/8” holes through each for the copper coil to go through. I started by using my drill that didn’t have a large enough drill bit, but I used to start the hole through the cork. I would then use the copper pipe, twisting it back and forth to widen the hole, then switch back and forth between drill/pipe until I made it through. If you have a 3/8” drill bit or opted for corks with pre-made holes go right ahead and ignore this step.

Here’s the copper pipe connected to the collector bottle (where the distilled liquid will end up after the vapor cools and returns to liquid form). In the original guide the author mentions “conditioning” the copper piping if you’re going to use this to distill something drinkable. This involves running a mixture of white vinegar and water through the pipe. Notice how short the length of copper looks here - this piece was cut to 16” like in the guide I followed, which is why I’m recommending a length of 24” - 32” as 16” was too short.

Here’s the still ready to go out on the fire escape. This picture was taken closer to noon when there wasn’t much direct sunlight, but at 3PM pointed southwest in January it looked like this baby would be getting plenty of sunlight (We’ll see how the actual distilling goes in the next post).

Shutting Down an iOS Side Project

2018-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

My project I’m about to shutdown is a marketplace app for paintball players to buy/sell/trade gear. It never attracted a large amount of users by any means (~80 daily active users at the end), but when it felt time to shutdown the idea to pull it from the App Store without warning felt wrong. People could be in the middle of a deal and not have a way to wrap up. Also I wanted to have some closure with a project I’d spent over a year working on.

How are you supposed to do this though? There are plenty of posts about how to build apps that others will (hopefully) use, but less on how to wind them down in a reasonable way. We are less likely to share what we may perceive as a failure. Though any difficult project (regardless of outcome) delivers plenty of valuable lessons.

“You are only entitled to the action, never to its fruits.”

Diving in

I hadn’t looked at the code in roughly 3 months because I’d lost interest and started working on other projects. I also had gotten in a position where I felt that an Android app would be more valuable than any additional work on the iOS side. On the Instagram page the #1 thing I heard was make it for Android. I ended up working on neither. Working on iOS felt like procrastinating working on something more impactful, and the idea of learning React Native to create an Android app (and potentially a cross-platform app) was appealing for a moment but ultimately I never did it.

Reasoning 🤔

I no longer had any interest working on the project and additional steps to grow users seemed not worthwhile. Server costs from AWS were insignificant, but felt like a waste when I’d get the bill and realize I hadn’t worked on the project that month.

I never achieved a large amount of users by any means with this project, but thinking about trying to grow just made me think about potential issues rather any type of satisfaction.

An online marketplace is something I would not recommend as a solo project (pretty obvious). It can be fun at first, but as it grows in size the amount of customer support you’ll have to provide is untenable. When people get ripped off it does not feel great at all (no active marketplace is 100% scammer free - no exceptions). Even though I received only 1-2 emails over roughly a year where someone had gotten scammed, that still felt bad. Thinking about potential user growth made me think about scammer growth instead. I had established rules, could direct people to PayPal for claims, and discourage/warn against trading on the platform, but bad things could still happen in a marketplace I had built and encouraged people to use.

I think there can be a tendency to shirk responsibility when it comes to addressing people behaving poorly that are enabled by something you created. I felt this way sometimes, but mostly felt guilty about anything that had happened or could happen that I wouldn’t be able to fix. No wonder people like to build RSS readers on the weekend and not eBay clones.

Steps

Release a version to the App Store with an alert that lets active users know the shutdown date. This gives people using the app roughly 1 month notice which seems fair for a small project

Announcement on social media (in my case just Instagram)
NO email message even though I do have access to most user emails in Firebase. I never sent emails to users and didn’t want to do it now, especially considering that many of those people are not using the app anymore. Shoutout to Overcast’s great policy when it comes to email
Respond to any messages/questions I receive via email or on Instagram

Day of Shutdown

Pull from App Store
Shutdown Firebase: disable write access to database, storage, and ensure I have one last backup saved
Shutdown EC2 instance I used for PayPal and sending Push Notifications (I think you can send Push Notifications with Cloud Functions in Firebase but never figured it out 🌝)
Cancel GoDaddy auto-renew for website domain, associated email address, and hosting

Clearly this is not how you would shutdown something of a larger scale. I couldn’t find any posts about ending a smaller iOS project so here we are.

Current Favorite Online Reads

2018-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

This is a short list of some of my favorite articles I’ve ever read online. These are mostly all Long Reads™️ so strap in if you click any of the links.

Lionhead: The Inside Story

Eurogamer

I love stories about entrepreneurs, especially those mixing art and commerce. This piece follows the enigmatic Peter Molyneux from his first games to the eventual creation of legendary Lionhead Studios (Fable, Black & White).

It’s an oral history with quotes from programmers/testers/designers all reminiscing about their time at Lionhead. They talk in-depth about the crunch time (24/7 development), but also the freedom they had and creative atmosphere at Lionhead. There were no roadmaps or schedules, just creative people working really hard to make great games. Definite cowboy style development. The excellent book Masters of Doom profiles id Software which had a similar development style: non-stop, few rules, maximum responsibility, total creative freedom, commitment to quality, and a strong point of view.

Again, a really great read where you can tell the author spent ages interviewing and researching to write the piece.

The Website Obesity Crisis

Idle Words

This one is definitely a Long Read™️ but the best kind. A deep dive into how we’ve gotten to the point where websites with sparse content can cause your laptop to overheat.

The tone is no-nonsense, humorous, and incredulous at some of the practices employed that have led to this problem. The author even has several examples where he takes a page and redesigns it, radically reducing file size in a few steps. This post also gets into controversial topics such as dynamically loaded ads and user tracking. Consciously designing smaller websites can actually improve the real world (cheesy but true). Smaller websites allow easier access for people without high speed internet, and less energy overall is used downloading needlessly large files.

Great quote to leave with from the article: “[T]ext-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature.” Also, this post from Fabien Sanglard about simplifying his website is really great. From him: “The homepage requires 23 HTTP requests. It weighs 1.5 MiB and takes 800 milliseconds to load. All that to show six images and a banner. If you scroll down all the way to the bottom, your browser will have transfered 5.6 MiB while performing 78 HTTP requests. How did I end up building this crap?”

Good Game Well Played: The Story of the Staying Power of ‘StarCraft’

The Ringer

Another piece about game development. I’m not sure if this is what I’ve been gravitating to lately, or these are the type of stories that stick with me because I’m a programmer that enjoys development war stories. Either way, a great story about a company buckling down to make a genre-defying game instead of releasing something subpar.

This is similar to the Eurogamer piece, with the author writing an oral history that includes Blizzard employees waxing poetically about their time making the game. There are stories about throwing up in trash cans, sleeping at desks (more crunch), and having their initial demo panned by audiences causing them to throw everything out.

I really love this quote from the article: “Like a lot of games in development, StarCraft seemed troubled until suddenly, one day, it didn’t”. That quote perfectly expresses the struggle on a long project where things are not really working, you’ve spent a lot of time already, and you have to keep going to find the end.

Rick Owens Interviews (Any)

Rick Owens - March 2002

Rick Owens is a truly unique fashion designer. Born in California and now living in Paris, his namesake brand is one of the largest independent fashion brands in the world.

I actually don’t own any of his clothing, though I’ve probably read all of his interviews and watched every YouTube video that includes him (this one from the New York Times at his studio in Paris is great). I love his extreme honesty, DISTINCT (all caps necessary here) point of view, humility, and humor with which he expresses his opinions. Some would call his clothing prohibitively expensive and the designs impractical (knee length shirts, drop-crotch shorts, “monster truck” style shoes). But the clothes are beautiful, dark, and aspirational. Also the store in New York looks more like an architecture museum than retail space.

The interviews on his website are all amazing. The one I chose to highlight includes these gems:

“HAS THERE BEEN ONE PIECE OF APPAREL YOU HAVE CREATED THAT YOU REGARD AS A TRANSCENDENT MASTERWORK?

[RO] OH. PLEASE.

THE MOST CLASSIC RICK OWEN-ISM?

[RO] “KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID.”

WHAT MAKES YOU MAD?

[RO] UMBRELLAS.

WHAT GIVES YOU PEACEFULNESS?

[RO] CONCRETE. “