The most recent episode or Radiolab is about how two parents, Kelley Benham and Tom French, faced the difficult question of what they were going to do when they learned that their daughter was going to be born at 23 weeks and 6 days—roughly half term. Benham wrote her incredible story in December for the Tampa Bay Times, which was published in three parts.

Ezra Klein has a piece looking at how the Affordable Care Act will affect businesses with more than 50 employees, which is basically: They don’t need to offer their employees health care, but if their employees apply for federal subsidies and buy coverage themselves, the employer must pay a small fraction of the cost (“a penalty equal to about 1/8th the cost of the average employer-provided health-insurance plan“).

Papa John’s isn’t happy about this because it’ll raise the cost of doing business. They’ve warned that they’ll have to raise the price of their pizzas by “11 to 14 cents per pie.” Which, I think people would be willing to pay! Or at least, I’d be willing to pay that knowing that the extra 14 cents is helping to give those pie makers some benefits.

Photo: mrsdkrebs

"I’ve had two root canals, deep cleanings, regular cleanings and like a dozen cavities," I say. "This ain’t my first rodeo."

I figured that if I can donate money to random people on Kickstarter, or to build an ad-free social platform, I can donate money to this father to care for his son.

>Our pals at LearnVest have a really nice piece by a woman diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and how the disease is bankrupting her family.

On Sept. 22, I collided with a bat while riding my bike near Montauk, N.Y. a little after 7 p.m. I'm talking about the winged mammal (I’ve had to specify this often. Is hooliganism on the rise?). It passed over my left hand and slapped my bare skin, just above my tank top’s neckline, and whipped around, likely stunned, or pinned by wind before falling to the pavement. So far, the cost of this incident totals over $16,600. Bills are still coming in.

I'm going to make a confession and tell you that I haven't been to the dentist in two years. I was the kid with braces and a broken jaw, and I got my teeth cleaned every six months. And then I just ... stopped. I don't have dental coverage now, and I'm just waiting for that moment where I bite into something and feel pain shoot throughout my mouth. When that happens, I'll just go ahead and pay out of pocket to take care of it immediately. I'm lucky I have the money in savings for such an occasion. The poor do not.

What I'd like to know from such a study is: If annual checkups don't actually help patients live longer, what do they cost the health care system?

This is the story of what happens when there are billions of dollars wrapped up in a prosaic piece of technology that at its core is closer to your kid’s science-fair entry than the Human Genome Project, one that despite all the commercial success and some 4 million or so patients still has its share of doubters in the medical community. It’s a story about luck and timing and the squeezing of the health care dollar. It is about betrayal and wrangling over patents. And mostly it is about invention, the tenuous and uncertain act of breathing life into an idea that may or may not have been yours all along.

Fortune Magazine’s story about how a simple medical device that closes wounds made millions for its inventors ($250 million in royalty fees), for Wake Forest University (which split the royalty fees after applying for a patent on the inventors’ behalf), and for the device’s marketers (KCI, which licensed the patents from Wake Forest University), and the patent battles that came soon after, really demonstrates some of the greed involved in the American health care system. It’s something to read if your cable goes out.

After college, like so many other recent graduates frantically staving off real life (or, in my case, the purgatory of a PhD program), I taught English abroad. I got a gig with the Austrian-American Educational Commission that seemed to be designed solely to encourage post-collegiate irresponsibility. I worked 12—you heard me—12 hours a week, and took home about €1,000 a month after taxes. Even after paying €350 in rent each month for the bigger bedroom in our two-bedroom flat, that €650 still stretched a long way.