Does the US not have standardized letter and envelope sizes? In Germany we have standards for paper sizes, window placement and the layout of business letters. Considering this type of letter is probably not typed out by hand, it's trivial to use a template with the correct layout. At that point the choice of letter becomes irrelevant. I'd expect the US to have something similar but maybe they don't? If there are sta…
There is no standard that I'm aware of. On a related note, if I had a dollar (or a Euro) for every US problem that the Germans solved long ago through straight thinking, I'd have enough money to move to Germany.
Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
91–100 of 130 posts
Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phew, they only needlessly and carelessly divulged 12,000 people's HIV status.
I never said it was a good thing. Even though the badness of the situation, I'm saying it would have been terribly worse with mass leaks of the DB this came from. It's not like we in the tech community have seen leaks like that... Regardless, I see this as a bad screw-up with with no ill intent behind it. It was literally a "too large window" on an envelope...
Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#93If you dont live in a place for 5 years, someone can open your bill and find out what you are getting billed for. (HIV tests and all)
Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those in one of the covered regions[1], Kaiser Permanente is largely not-evil. You have to go through your GP to get referrals to specialists, but it's a series of mostly consistent "I have X problem" "Try Y" "Didn't work" "Try Z" "Didn't Work" "OK, let's get you to a specialist" events. They have an interesting governance structure ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente ) that tries to align incentive…
Lots of people complain about Kaiser. I was a member when I was growing up, and have signed up again now that I have a job offering Kaiser coverage. For me Kaiser is a couple things. First of all it is peace of mind. They won't screw you. Essentially everything they offer is covered at a reasonable rate. Example: I was sent to the emergency room once and was able to pay on the spot with the cash in my wallet. Secondl…
Compare to one of my friends with a bog-standard vaginal birth, was pressured to leave as soon as possible, partner kept getting kicked out of the room, and she paid $7k and counting while still getting random claims. LC visits also not covered despite wanting to breastfeed desperately, and she gave up due to issues that could have been resolved.
It's not even just the baby stuff that is like this - my dad has their medicare advantage plan and he LOVES it and I love the integrated care since it's so easy for his specialists to talk to each other without me having to be the messenger.
Kaiser gets a bad rap a lot of times, sometimes for good reason, but in the average case, they must be doing something okay that they don't fight me like Anthem used to do ALL THE TIME (plus remember when maternity coverage cost like $500 extra _per month_ on the individual market?)
Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you know how to "don't take no for an answer" I'll say optimistically, you'll be alright. My experience with my wife's health care (Aetna) has been that she will call, try to get an issue resolved, be told "there is no resolution possible" enough times by enough different people that she is ready to give up. Then we call together, and suddenly the story changes. The particular issue we were dealing with, is not re…
What floors me is how no one has disrupted this field yet. I have seen a few ground zero startups trying to disrupt healthcare. Make it more effecient, cut out fraud, etc but so far no one is making a dent. Why is it so hard for some smart young folks to come along and hammer out solutions to accomplish less fraud, easier, and faster to use systems etc? It seems like it's really REALLY hard to bust up this abortion w…
Efficiency is a tough nut to crack but there are organizations like Kaiser Permanente that have been very successful with a vertical integration model to cut this overhead. The problem is that it's a political fight every step of the way - doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and drug makers each have their own extremely powerful lobbies who will spend lavishly to keep their cut of the profits flowing.
Which is why we're actually moving in the opposite direction - the ACA moves away from this type of integrated care organization and towards a fee-for-service model. The idea is to have the consumer be the one choosing the cheapest MRI provider or whatever - but in practice the pricing is still entirely opaque and the public are more or less thrown to the wolves. The finest health-care plan the Heritage Foundation could devise...
And of course everyone has their own idea of how to improve efficiency, all of which translates into a lot of paperwork and red tape. That is why your insurance denies claims after all - "efficiency" (airquotes). It creeps into every aspect of medical care, especially anything having to do with Federal dollars (Medicare/Medicaid). And to be fair a lot of it is justified, it is an uphill battle to get providers to adopt even basic best-practices like checklists during surgical procedures ("remove and count all 5 pieces of gauze before you close the patient"...). Another thing that doctors fight tooth and nail is clinical decision-support tools - even though these are a value-add for the physician in many cases (did you want to order that test with contrast or without? A family doctor may not know.)
(disclosure: I worked on such a tool at my current employer)
One little-addressed area of extreme waste is generic drugs. The idea is that once your patent expires (after decades of "patent evergreening" of course) anyone can make your drug - but in practice that's not how it works, one company just dumps product on the market at cost until everyone else leaves the market, at which point they are once again free to charge whatever they want. The overhead costs of starting drug production is quite high, and in practice it's more difficult for new drugs to claim bioequivalence because the drugs involve biological steps in their production. A company is not obligated to share the organisms used in their production process and if a competitor creates their own they must repeat FDA approval processes, which are inordinately expensive.
Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is really beside the point. The incentive for profit-driven insurers is not to pay for health coverage to whatever extent they can get away with.
Maybe we shouldn't be funding healthcare on a profit-driven basis then.
Those organization types are just as motivated to save money as for-profit is.
Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two sides to the story though (I'm not defending Aetna, I'm saying this is not only a problem for people who live around bigots.) Some non-zero percent of those 12k people live with a partner who doesn't know their HIV status. It is (edit: could be, if untreated) totally unethical for those people to fail to disclose their status to their partners, but arguably it's much worse for those people to be outed b…
I fully expect to get downvoted for this, but it's an important point that I have to address. > Some non-zero percent of those 12k people live with a partner who doesn't know their HIV status. It is totally unethical for those people to fail to disclose their status to their partners This is itself based in old misinformation about HIV that serves to perpetuate harmful stigmas around HIV. HIV is treatable, and when p…
When thinking about the ethical implications you have to take the real world into consideration, not the perfect world.
Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no standard that I'm aware of. On a related note, if I had a dollar (or a Euro) for every US problem that the Germans solved long ago through straight thinking, I'd have enough money to move to Germany.
If I had a dollar for every problem the Germans introduce by over-thinking current problems I could drive a German luxury car (that is old enough to not still be under warranty).
...and then your mechanic will curse you for having a vehicle that is insanely difficult (and expensive) to repair (hang out on /r/justrolledintotheshop for a little while to see what I mean - "service position" anybody? Or what about the carnage to fix a simple heater core?)...
Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#99Re: Aetna accidentally exposed customer HIV statuses in clear envelope windows
#100They have already OCR-ed addresses from mail, for years. If they are now retaining the raw images, does this mean that they've inadvertently collected and are holding the HIV status of all the Aetna customers affected by this information leak?
So far, it seems the USPS is not selling what it's collected. (Although I'm sure some of the "make a buck any way you can" crowd in DC and elsewhere would not be above enabling and pushing them to do so.) But, next year? And in case you thing this is far-fetched, many state departments of motor vehicles (DMV) already make their drivers license photographs commercially available, IIRC.