Wisconsin’s governor Tony Evers wants to hold insurance companies accountable and push for initiatives to improve the health care of its citizens. As part of Governor Evers’ state budget plan, he intends on auditing insurance companies when they repeatedly deny claims made by his constituents.
Evers’ 2025–2027 Executive Budget includes sweeping changes in how Wisconsinites access health care. Along with auditing health insurers who frequently deny claims, Evers is pushing to reduce appointment waiting times at medical facilities, eliminate sales tax for over-the-counter medications, prevent surprise medical billing and report unpaid medical debt to collection and credit bureaus, extend postpartum coverage for new mothers and their babies, mental health initiatives, and invest money into hospitals throughout the state to improve health care (especially in rural areas). Those aren’t the only proposals.
“As part of my comprehensive plan to lower costs for working families, I’m also proposing sweeping plans to lower costs for prescriptions and medication and crack down on price gouging and health insurers,” said Evers. “Let’s finally make lowering everyday, out-of-pocket costs for medication a bipartisan priority this session.”
This movement by the governor would make Wisconsin the first state in America to have an office to enact a correction action plan that enforces insurers to provide coverage if constituents are unjustifiably declined. This comes at a time when, according to a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 58% of insured American adults experienced a problem with their health insurance. Along with that, four in ten Americans who had trouble paying medical debt cited health insurance denials as part of their problem. A Commonwealth Fund survey also found that 47% of those who dealt with a denied claim reported that their health issue worsened because of it. That survey also found that 45% of participants were charged for a service they thought was free or covered by their insurance plan.
Nearly half of insured people were billed for a service they thought was covered.Photo credit: Canva
“Folks can’t get a straight answer on what’s covered by insurance and what’s not,” says Evers. “People get sicker and health problems get worse because it takes too long to get an appointment or be approved for care—if it’s ever approved at all. People try to get their care paid for but insurance companies refuse to cover it. Families get a medical bill and see all sorts of charges they didn’t know about. Or, even worse, suddenly, collections agencies are calling about unpaid medical bills they didn’t even know they hadn’t paid.”
If you wish to see improvement in health care access in your state, the American Medical Association has some suggested starting points: Investigate the medical facilities in your area to see if they offer telehealth services, if they could improve efficiency when seeing and processing patients, and if they have a shortage of physicians. Ask them what needs to be done to address those issues. You can bring this up to town hall meetings, write to your representatives, and join with others who see this as an issue worth addressing. You can research or even help draft proposals to bring about change in your state’s health care or back up candidates that champion your views.
There are ways you can help improve health care services in your state.Photo credit: Canva
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.