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I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

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Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#71

Post by ballenf »

leeter wrote: post #28
jastanton wrote: post #6

I was nodding along until this: > They posted my entire medical record, including notes about my mental health, my bills, my insurance info, my driver’s license, birth date and home address,” she said. wow. That violates HIPAA law. The counter-sue is going to be huge. Also, I had a related issue where a doctor threatened to sue based on my yelp review. I cut the review back to verifiable facts instead of opinion and…

Reviews are protected speech, this has been litigated multiple times and has precedent in the US. If you live in an area with a SLAPP law I would suggest getting an attorney to file a SLAPP motion for you. The onus is then on the plaintiff to prove they aren't suing you to stifle your speech. If they can't then they have to pay full court costs and your attorney's fees as well as a penalty in many jurisdictions. In t…

That's fine but they don't have to pay until after the case and appeals. Meaning you have to be able to front the litigation costs in order to have a chance at recovering them. There is a non-zero risk of losing.

I would suggest using a pseudonym and VPN for any review written on a potentially litigious business unless you have the funds to litigate. Problem is Yelp is much more likely to mark the review as spam.

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#72

Post by matte_black »

ballenf wrote: post #71
leeter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviews are protected speech, this has been litigated multiple times and has precedent in the US. If you live in an area with a SLAPP law I would suggest getting an attorney to file a SLAPP motion for you. The onus is then on the plaintiff to prove they aren't suing you to stifle your speech. If they can't then they have to pay full court costs and your attorney's fees as well as a penalty in many jurisdictions. In t…

That's fine but they don't have to pay until after the case and appeals. Meaning you have to be able to front the litigation costs in order to have a chance at recovering them. There is a non-zero risk of losing. I would suggest using a pseudonym and VPN for any review written on a potentially litigious business unless you have the funds to litigate. Problem is Yelp is much more likely to mark the review as spam.

What if you win but they immediately go bankrupt and cannot pay you back?

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#73

Post by [deleted] »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #30
caiocaiocaio wrote: post #3

Yelp doesn't seem to have brought a lot of a joy into anyone's life.

I visited Spain last summer and my family would typically just walk around where we were looking for a restaurant that seemed good, and almost always got stuck in tourist traps with bad Americanized food at high prices. When we started using Yelp to find places to eat we found little hole-in-the-wall tapas places with absolutely no American influence and amazing food that we still talk about to this day.

[deleted]

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#74

Post by liveoneggs »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #66
ssijak wrote: post #45

One thing that sticks to me when I read such articles (I am not from US) is how ridiculously pricey medical services are. Common, 1k$ for a regular exam that costs like 20euros in my country in private clinics?! And I read about this ridiculous prices US so often that I am dumbstruck that people are cool with it. Another thing that struck me is that if you don`t have money, evil people can just silence you by suing y…

The "prices" are moves in a game played between hospitals and insurance providers, and don't correspond to anything real or to the amount that gets paid. If a hospital discovers that the patient doesn't have insurance they'll be charged the real (more reasonable) prices instead.

sometimes maybe if that patient is lucky and smart enough to know the inside tricks

The discount is not guaranteed.

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#75

Post by Fej »

ceejayoz wrote: post #27
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

> “They tried to drag my start-up wine-and-spirits technology business into it … They posted my entire medical record, including notes about my mental health, my bills, my insurance info, my driver’s license, birth date and home address,” she said. That screams HIPAA violation, to me. The practice could (and should) be shut down over it.

If it happened. The story is in a tabloid, and that's such an insanely egregious breach of HIPAA that I'm a little skeptical that it played out exactly like that.

Perhaps not exactly. But of all the tabloids, the NY Post has to be one of the most reputable.

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#76

Post by leeter »

matte_black wrote: post #72
ballenf wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine but they don't have to pay until after the case and appeals. Meaning you have to be able to front the litigation costs in order to have a chance at recovering them. There is a non-zero risk of losing. I would suggest using a pseudonym and VPN for any review written on a potentially litigious business unless you have the funds to litigate. Problem is Yelp is much more likely to mark the review as spam.

What if you win but they immediately go bankrupt and cannot pay you back?

Courts have a tendency to look on this as criminal contempt and refer the lawyer and the client to the various AGs when this happens.

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#77

Post by ballenf »

brightball wrote: post #70
jastanton wrote: post #6

I was nodding along until this: > They posted my entire medical record, including notes about my mental health, my bills, my insurance info, my driver’s license, birth date and home address,” she said. wow. That violates HIPAA law. The counter-sue is going to be huge. Also, I had a related issue where a doctor threatened to sue based on my yelp review. I cut the review back to verifiable facts instead of opinion and…

My question around reviews in medical is always around how a physician is supposed to be able to respond because of HIPAA? It almost seems unfair to be able to review them since there is very little they can do to refute anything without violating it. It seems like there should be some special set of rules around medical reviews, in my opinion at least.

You can explain just that in the response and not much more.

Even if the patient reveals PHI you should avoid confirming or acknowledging it as the "covered entity" under HIPAA. A confirmation of a diagnosis is different than a person discussing symptoms. I would argue that you probably should avoid even acknowledging that the person is a patient or has been seen in the office. The approach will reinforce to others how seriously you take privacy and you can taut your customer service policies, etc.

I wouldn't call this unfair since all providers are in the same situation.

(This isn't legal advice, obviously.)

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#78

Post by duked »

I just went on their yelp page and was noticed a huge spike in negative review (talk about the streisand effect...). but what surprised me was the yelp notification: "Active Cleanup Alert

This business recently made waves in the news, which often means that people come to this page to post their views on the news.

While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to these news events, we do work to remove both positive and negative posts that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer’s personal consumer experience with the business.

As a result, your posts to this page may be removed as part of our cleanup process beginning Tuesday, May 29, 2018, but you should feel free to post your thoughts about the recent media coverage for this business on Yelp Talk at any time. "

So is it like the news coverage never happened ? seems kind of disingenuous to remove everything during that period (whatever time frame they will decide on is interesting too)

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#79

Post by nambit »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #66
ssijak wrote: post #45

One thing that sticks to me when I read such articles (I am not from US) is how ridiculously pricey medical services are. Common, 1k$ for a regular exam that costs like 20euros in my country in private clinics?! And I read about this ridiculous prices US so often that I am dumbstruck that people are cool with it. Another thing that struck me is that if you don`t have money, evil people can just silence you by suing y…

The "prices" are moves in a game played between hospitals and insurance providers, and don't correspond to anything real or to the amount that gets paid. If a hospital discovers that the patient doesn't have insurance they'll be charged the real (more reasonable) prices instead.

Millions of americans pay those sticker prices. Just because millions more don't or get discounts doesn't change the fact that those are very real prices.

Re: I wrote a negative Yelp review and it made my life a nightmare

#80

Post by knodi123 »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #66
ssijak wrote: post #45

One thing that sticks to me when I read such articles (I am not from US) is how ridiculously pricey medical services are. Common, 1k$ for a regular exam that costs like 20euros in my country in private clinics?! And I read about this ridiculous prices US so often that I am dumbstruck that people are cool with it. Another thing that struck me is that if you don`t have money, evil people can just silence you by suing y…

The "prices" are moves in a game played between hospitals and insurance providers, and don't correspond to anything real or to the amount that gets paid. If a hospital discovers that the patient doesn't have insurance they'll be charged the real (more reasonable) prices instead.

> and don't correspond to anything real or to the amount that gets paid.

Aren't designed to correspond to real payments. But like a sumo wrestling match in a kindergarten, sometimes the little guy gets squashed by accident. And you wind up with people getting $20k bills that don't necessarily know how to get out from under them.

It's

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