• Guns0rWeD13@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    my wife just went to help her estranged mother come home from the nursing home the hospital had put her in after her surgery. she said they tried to get her to sign her entire life away to united healthcare before releasing her, and probably would have if she hadn’t been there to stop it.

    they wanted to milk her for everything they could, racking up massive medical bills by keeping her there, and then have her sign her life and possessions over to UHC to recoup expenses. when my wife took her home they said it was against medical advice, which allows them to deny coverage for the bills she incurred.

    fucking vultures. free luigi.

  • swelter_spark@reddthat.com
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    4 hours ago

    My insurer just announced that the addiction counseling service that used to be provided for free to members is going away. Is addiction no longer a medical issue?

    • lemonbun@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      no addiction means you’re a drug addict and need to get deported trump assures united of this.

  • sowitzer@lemm.ee
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    7 hours ago

    While not the point of this thread, just wanted to note for anyone struggling, themselves or someone they care about, there are lots of resources for addiction out there. Many of them free.

    A treatment center can be a safe place to get clean and gain some knowledge, but it is a lifelong struggle for most who have addiction issues. Going into a treatment center does not “cure” most.

    Please seek out help, even if you do not have insurance or are unable to go to a treatment center.

  • LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe
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    10 hours ago

    This is clearly a case of terrorism and we need to send a message that we will not negotiate with terrorists. Give the current CEO the death penalty.

  • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Will the oligarchs seek the death penalty for this company killing a civilian child?

    No

    But they’ll seek the death penalty for a civilian killing one of them.

  • Wilco@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Oligarchs vs their Consumers. Both now killing each other openly. The opening of true class warfare.

      • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I wonder what the previous could have written.

        Surely the comment wasn’t removed because he was encouraging people to demonstrate their displeasure regarding their denied claims directly to the health insurance’s CEO, as that would be perfectly legal.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          19 hours ago

          Friendly reminder that Lemmy’s modlogs are completely transparent and you can see the exact text of the removed comment by checking the modlog.

          • CoolThingAboutMe@aussie.zone
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            13 hours ago

            Would you be able to tell me how to do this? I’m on mobile, I have admittedly only spent a few seconds searching but I can’t see modlogs.

            • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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              4 hours ago

              Your instance’a mobile site should have a link at the bottom that says “modlog” unless it has some weird front end that isn’t the default.

            • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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              11 hours ago

              I’ve never noticed it from in Jerboa, so I dunno if it or any other app can do it. But on mobile web it’s hidden behind the community’s sidebar. The sidebar can be accessed via an expando from the top of the community page, or under the post and the comment box, but above any comments, on a post page. The modlog link is right at the bottom of the sidebar.

  • fossilesque@mander.xyz
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    1 day ago

    I don’t know how you can work for these companies and sleep at night, especially at the executive levels. Utter psychopathy.

    • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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      10 hours ago

      Thank you for the opening, I have a very true story to tell about that very subject.

      I met my wife on vacation in the 90’s, and after a few long distance months, she decided to move to where I lived. As a trained, experienced secretary from NYC, she used her own tried-and-true method of getting a job - she signed up with a good temp agency, and worked a series of temp jobs until she found a job where she fit in, hoping they would want to keep her.

      She went through a series of bad employers, until she ended up working a temp job with the state’s biggest healthcare company. She sat outside the office of a corporate lawyer whose sole job was to look through the files of people with the most expensive treatments, and find some excuse, any excuse, to cancel them, no matter how flimsy. Usually it was some pre-existing condition, like allergies. For example, if someone was getting expensive cancer treatments, this lawyer would find some evidence that they knew they had allergies when they got their insurance, and the lawyer would cancel their insurance based on that small unrelated issue. People who had paid premiums for years, were cancelled at the very moment they needed their insurance the most. They also didn’t refund the thousands of dollars they’d paid in premiums, they kept it all, despite refusing to provid the service that had been paid for. Her refusal of treatment DEFINITELY led to the deaths of people, and this lawyer was nothing short of a Corporate Serial Killer.

      My wife worked the job for three months, becoming increasingly uncomfortable and unhappy as she realized what she was assisting this Corporate Serial Killer in doing (and so did I), and was planning on having the temp agency find a a new position for her.

      Before she was able to do that, she came home and told me “They offered me the job.” It was a good opportunity, with better pay and good benefits. Normally, it would be time to celebrate, but she was clearly heavily conflicted. I asked what wanted to do, and she reluctantly said she was going to take the job, because we needed the money.

      I told her we didn’t need the money that bad, that it wasn’t worth destroying her soul over (we aren’t religious, I meant it in a more metaphorical way). I had already been concerned about the psychological toll the job had been taking, so I also told her that she was never going back there, and to call the temp agency tomorrow for a new position. Let them tell the company that she was never going back. We’d get by for a while longer, until something better came along.

      I still remember her look of relief when I told her that I didn’t expect her to work that soul-sucking job any lomger. She got a new temp job that developed into a permanent position that she held for years.

      Years later, when Sarah Palin started talking about “death panels” associated with Obabacare, my wife said “Death Panels already exist at healh care companies, I personally worked for that company’s one-woman death panel.”

      I know personally how psychopathic these health care companies are, and they should be run out of business for their fraudulent practices. They are Serial Killer Corporations, murdering people for profit. We need to put health care in the hands of an entity without a profit motive, and the only thing like that is the government. I was already thinking along the lines of Universal Health Care before my wife’s experience cemented my firm belief in it.

      My wife’s experience is why I support Luigi 100%, even though he is totally innocent of all charges.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      I was listening to the Acquired episode on Epic and they touch on the severe cost overruns in our healthcare system. They make a point to share that hospitals aren’t the ones making a killing. It’s insurance companies.

      They make a compelling argument that if you add up the total that you pay to insurance, taking into account what your employer pays, there’s no way you get that much value out of your health insurance annually.

      • medgremlin@midwest.social
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        48 minutes ago

        I have a number of complex chronic health problems and I usually hit my out-of-pocket limit around April every year. I find spiteful glee in costing my health insurance tens of thousands of dollars every year. (And every penny of it is actually medically necessary.)

      • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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        7 hours ago

        insurance is always a gamble, and the house always wins

        don’t insure anything you can afford to lose, and save up money you’d put into insurance in a HISA

        that said, things you can’t afford to lose probably include your house, someone else’s lamborghini, your health

        buuuuuuut US health care is set up for bargaining: hospitals overcharge, pharmacies overcharge, drug companies overcharge because they all know insurance companies aren’t gonna pay what they actually charge because they have bargaining power… which, if you don’t have insurance, leaves you holding the fucking ball with no bargaining power

        … all of this is said as an aussie, with universal healthcare and only a passing (but real life) experience of the US healthcare system (and in general a system that will protect me from fucking up so hard i can’t even imagine being completely destitute), so grain of salt n all that

      • fossilesque@mander.xyz
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        1 day ago

        It’s a metaphorical gun to the head. It’s not designed to help. The purpose of the system is what it does.

      • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        Oh man, epic is such complicated garbage that even with a company brought in to set it up, the center I worked at during the rollout was a fucking mess. I left 14-18 months after initial deployment and they were still ironing bugs out, and I heard they rolled back within a year or so of leaving. Also, it’s almost hilarious how often I hear nurses bitching about using epic just when I have to go in for anything, and none of them are related to the place I worked.

        • Elextra@literature.cafe
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          I respectfully disagree after you try other EHRs like Cerner lol

          I also haven’t heard complaints about Epic with bugs at least in my org. They are pretty user friendly especially when we have some staff that can barely type. The only complaint was documentation. Nursing documentation was tedious with like over 250 options for “adult assessment” but they’ve slimed it down to like 50 earlier this year for my healthcare system. Lastly, I think things work better the more money hospitals put in the EHR. I was per diem for another healthcare system. It was pretty cool how many other features they had than ours.

          • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 day ago

            Must just be one of those “yeah my product is awful but have you seen the other guy?” sort of situations. I never had to use the EMR directly outside of troubleshooting, but both epic and the previous EMR were pretty garbage so I don’t really have a good baseline to go off of.

            • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 day ago

              The Acquired episode made it clear that the customer isn’t the people who use the software. Their customer is the CEO and the CIOs of hospital systems.

              • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                1 day ago

                That would explain a lot. I’m pretty sure the CEO/CFO (can’t remember which) got let go for embezzlement or something a year or so after I was gone.

            • WFloyd@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              yeah my product is awful but have you seen the other guy

              Yeah, it’s this. I worked at Epic somewhat recently, and I’ve since worked with former Cerner/Oracle folks too. To Epic’s credit, they’ve never been acquired, and are better for it.

              There’s a lot of vocational awe across the board, people genuinely trying their best to make the product good. But healthcare is inherently complicated, because people are complicated. Each individual health system needs it customized to their specific needs, and over time this can get hairy to support. Add on to that that regulations and guidelines literally change every year, and it can become really hard to make headway on more meaningful changes when you’re just trying to stay compliant.

              This leads to burnout on the software support side, Epic churns through new hires like crazy - average tenure has been way down since COVID-19 (you can Google their response to that), so it’s a revolving door of 21-25 year olds keeping that ship afloat.

              Also, yes, insurance companies are the ones making the big money, by a mile.

      • restingboredface@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        That’s kind of interesting because I used to work in health insurance (mental health specifically, so it has its own quirks), and it felt like things were always in financially dicey territory. It must be different in medical.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        The costs are inflated for sure, but compared to to cost of paying for cancer treatment entirely out of pocket, it’s still cheaper. That’s the whole point of insurance, to cover the event of a catastrophic cost.

        • nfh@lemmy.world
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          Why do you think the cost of paying out of pocket is so high? Private insurance bears a significant part of the responsibility for causing that problem.

          Structurally, yes, you need a system that amounts to healthy people saving, and sick people being taken care of from those savings, whether it’s individual or social. But our current system of private for-profit insurance is about as bad as such a system could be while still technically sorta working.

        • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          I’m not as sure about that. If you paid your premiums, etc. into a low yield savings account, especially when you start when you’re young, I think the value proposition would be more than insurance where you have no way to control payment decisions.

          Please do not read this as me saying don’t get insurance. Read it as our insurance is failing to provide the value that we pay into it and need something better.

          The Acquired episode goes into detail how we ended up with a private payer system and it’s so infuriating. Our health system was being set up around the same time as the UKs and they show how different incentives lead to where we are.

    • pulido@lemmings.world
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      Literally nobody in their social circles holds them accountable for what they’re a part of.

      It’s like ignoring your friends are part of the Nazi Regime because they’re “just doing it for the money.”

    • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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      Abstraction. They don’t even see individual numbers of denied claims, they see a percentage, a percentage of chance and other KPI. For they, there’s no people being affected by the denials, only indicators.

      • fossilesque@mander.xyz
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        I don’t know man, I ended a friendship with someone when I realised they couldn’t figure out that the insurance company they worked for was abusive to them and everyone else. I realised we lived in completely different realities and it was affecting my mood too. It’s also what made me realise that marketing should be borderline illegal. These companies are so utterly toxic to their own employees I don’t know why there haven’t been more Luigis from the inside. Ironically, I think it was UC too!! She and her colleagues had to reapply for their jobs 3x+ in one year.

        Healthcare is the number one reason I won’t return. It is also the reason America will continue to crumble. If you nationalise healthcare, you have to regulate business to not burden the healthcare system and this affects all sectors. America loves bombing brown people more than it loves it’s own children. Despicable.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      Don’t kill people with guns. Kill people with paperwork. Most effective serial murder in the world. We know their motives, MO, and exactly where they live, but nobody will prosecute them.

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        I’m told the best way to kill someone and get away with it is to hit them with your car. Not, like, drive into a crowd of people, but like nail them when they’re crossing the street or walking near the side of the road. Especially if they’re walking or on a bike. You can just say you didn’t see them or whatever, and our car-focused culture will be like “yeah ok that happens.”

        So hypothetically if any healthcare CEOs are out jogging in their suburbs, someone could run them over and maybe not even be charged with a crime.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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          Nah, because it’s a CEO the person who does it would definitely get charges, and they would likely push for the death penalty, even for a traffic accident.

          CEOs are not on the same level as the rest of us.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          Might be right, but remember that the families of healthcare CEOs can find a good lawyer to sue your ass for wrongful death.

    • DeathsEmbrace@lemm.ee
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      10 hours ago

      Fuck were going to need a pumped up kicks for ceos if we keep needing more Luigi. Some music to keep us pumped.

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      Reminds me of a scene in Fight Club when Robert Paulson accidentally becomes a martyr. The crew partially took his death as, “we are all Robert Paulson,” we are all this martyr.

      There is a nation of Luigis, and it’s everyone. Everyone just has to stop waiting to die. It need not be violent or deadly, either. One way would be merely: Everyone just has to stop. Doing everything. At the same time.

      Probably a good time would be around when the supply chains completely collapse in 10 or so days from now.

        • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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          Because it takes 3 weeks for cargo ships to arrive in California from China. Trump announced his tarrifs 3 weeks ago, so imported items are about to drop off

      • pulido@lemmings.world
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        People need to get off the consumer bandwagon in order for this to happen.

        Whenever we’re on the brink of radical change, all it takes is a new hollywood movie to come out to distract everyone.

  • stinky@redlemmy.com
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    1 day ago

    Following the killing of Brian Thompson, Tim Noel replaced him as the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Noel had previously served as the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare & Retirement unit. The announcement came after Thompson was fatally shot in December.

  • aramova@infosec.pub
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    1 day ago

    It’s what Healthcare CEOs call Durable Savings.

    The family premiums won’t go down with one less child, but costs are saved.

    Win-win for shareholders!