Hear, hear! Absolutely spot on! Before joining, I never tried to make any money on the site. I wrote some writer activism blogs and I read as much as I was able – and, some of the folks I read would share "friend links" with me.

I was a long time joining because that $5 a month was hard to come by when my meds and our health insurance were costing as much as our mortgage. We were making choices between buying my meds and groceries – and that was with a fast growing kid in the house.

After the Biden administration shored up the ACA, our premiums went down to around $30 a month instead of hundreds a month. And, many of my meds went down in cost too – like my diabetes and heart med. Plus, the insurance from the Marketplace must now cover my needles (they didn't before). I've been on Medium since 2016. However, when that premium and the out of pocket cost of my meds went down, one of the first things we decided we could afford was the membership. I upgraded to the member/partner program in March 2022.

Plus they had to cover my nebulizer machine and vials of Ipratropium Bromide for my more protracted asthmatic episodes, as well as BOTH my rescue inhaler and my daily maintenance med for it. That had more to do with my medical crisis in 2018, I think. In fact, before my crisis, they didn't cover the machine at all and often declined my maintenance med. After the PE I had in 2018 (among the raft of other critical health issues at the same time), the insurance company stopped dicking around about my asthma meds.