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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

#191
post #34

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…

>Wow. That violates HIPAA law. The counter-sue is going to be huge. Basically an open and shut case too. Assuming they were smart enough to "correct" the mistake it may not be a Tier 4 ($50,000+) violation, but instead a Tier 3 violation ($10,000 - $50,000 per violation) of willful neglect. I'm not sure if each violation above would be considered a single large violation or multiple small violations ( 1 violation vs…

You seem like you know what you're talking about. A few years ago, I got a Facebook message from a girl that lived in my town. She said something like "This is really weird, but did you have shoulder surgery by X doctor last October? If so, that surgeon just did my knee and after my rehab told me that she thought you and I would be a good match. Would you want to grab dinner sometime?"

I was really confused. Wasn't this a HIPAA violation? If yes, what do you even do about it? Feels like a cause for concern if your doctor is also trying to play cupid? What should I do/have done?

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

#193
post #31

> “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.

I'm curious if that is accurate or not. It hangs in a weird way in the article and doesn't indicate where the info was posted.

even if this is not accurate and the woman exaggerated her claims, just look at all the comments in this post. She already got the effect she was looking for.

People freak out the moment they hear privacy violation. They get angry and stop thinking. The comment above from AdmiralAsshat already says "the practice should be shut down". Some comments above say "it's an open and shut case" without even knowing the details of the proceedings.

Can you imagine if as a doctor, you kept your patient's info private, but a patients says you "posted her medical record" even though it was sealed for her court proceedings? Wow

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

#194
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is awful, and they should be punished severely for that. This reveals a predicament for businesses that have to protect customer privacy. If a restaurant owner thinks a customer is lying, they can call the person out on all kinds of media and say they're a liar. Alamo Drafthouse made a set of videos to play before movies making fun of a customer complaint call, telling her to eff off. If a doctor believe a patie…

This is why, at least in the UK, there are several pathways to resolve disputes - both in the hospital trust and above it, which is in part to avoid this kind of scenario. If that doesn't resolve it the patient usually approaches a lawyer to seek compensation, and most times this is settled out of court and in private. When patients and family hit social media, the hospital/doctors are not able to publicly talk about…

[deleted]

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

#195
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> am dumbstruck that people are cool with it. Huge numbers, perhaps a majority, are not cool with it. We've had national elections fueled by the discontent. But at least so far the political configuration of that discontent, not the magnitude of it, has prevented progress on lowering the cost of health care.

But at least so far the political configuration of that discontent, not the magnitude of it, has prevented progress on lowering the cost of health care. Health insurance in this country suffers from kind of a legacy situation. It is sort of like how the qwerty keyboard is terribly inefficient, but most people continue to use it. From what I have read, at some point health insurance was offered as a means to beef up c…

One can argue over the implementation method, but fundamentally a society must decide whether they believe health care - both routine/simple and unexpected/severe - is a right of all or a privilege for just some. If you say it's a right, everyone has to participate and those of means have to help pay for those who have none. The individual mandate was an admittedly roundabout way to achieve that.

The old system of paying a doctor outright with a check or cash was not a universal healthcare solution - a lot of people couldn't afford it even back then.

Most developed countries deal with the cost problems of health care through strong price regulation, even the relatively laissez-faire systems like Singapore [1] or Switzerland.

Obamacare did a lot to improve access [2] (subsidies, pre-existing conditions, adult children on parents plans) - it's a lot like the Swiss system, - but unlike that system, it did very little to address costs.

1. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/upshot/what-makes-sing...

2. https://www.kff.org/uninsured/fact-sheet/key-facts-about-the...

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

#196
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least so far the political configuration of that discontent, not the magnitude of it, has prevented progress on lowering the cost of health care. Health insurance in this country suffers from kind of a legacy situation. It is sort of like how the qwerty keyboard is terribly inefficient, but most people continue to use it. From what I have read, at some point health insurance was offered as a means to beef up c…

One can argue over the implementation method, but fundamentally a society must decide whether they believe health care - both routine/simple and unexpected/severe - is a right of all or a privilege for just some. If you say it's a right, everyone has to participate and those of means have to help pay for those who have none. The individual mandate was an admittedly roundabout way to achieve that. The old system of pa…

I agree with you. So I'm not sure what the argument is here. I was only describing how we got to the current morass and why it is so hard to extricate ourselves and do something not crazy.

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

#197
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "if the hospital discovers", it's if the patient is uninsured and makes it clear to the billing department that they're hopelessly broke, then the hospital gets flexible with the charges or even writes them off. Many billing departments have flexibility and expect to write off a fair number of bills rather than send them to collections, but they're hardly pushing discounted bills or automatically giving disc…

If you get lucky you get that. Hospital around where I was (Indiana) rarely did such things. My uncle owed over 250k for emergency heart surgery. That was the discounted price, "as low as they could go". Dude only made around 30k per year... doing flooring, which could now kill him. Even if he could go back to his work, he had been off work for a couple months. The hospital's "reasonable payments" exceeded his income…

What may work (if he has credit and can cover the lowered amount) is "I can borrow enough to cover the Medicare rate for this and pay it now if that will cover it in full. If that won't cover it then I'm not going to borrow from friends and family when I'll still be paying you and never be able to pay them back."

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

#198

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…

If you like to write reviews, buy umbrella insurance. It's cheap and covers all sorts of random stuff for millions.

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

#199
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wow. That violates HIPAA law. The counter-sue is going to be huge. Basically an open and shut case too. Assuming they were smart enough to "correct" the mistake it may not be a Tier 4 ($50,000+) violation, but instead a Tier 3 violation ($10,000 - $50,000 per violation) of willful neglect. I'm not sure if each violation above would be considered a single large violation or multiple small violations ( 1 violation vs…

You seem like you know what you're talking about. A few years ago, I got a Facebook message from a girl that lived in my town. She said something like "This is really weird, but did you have shoulder surgery by X doctor last October? If so, that surgeon just did my knee and after my rehab told me that she thought you and I would be a good match. Would you want to grab dinner sometime?" I was really confused. Wasn't t…

Did you pick a nice restaurant?

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

#200
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wow. That violates HIPAA law. The counter-sue is going to be huge. Basically an open and shut case too. Assuming they were smart enough to "correct" the mistake it may not be a Tier 4 ($50,000+) violation, but instead a Tier 3 violation ($10,000 - $50,000 per violation) of willful neglect. I'm not sure if each violation above would be considered a single large violation or multiple small violations ( 1 violation vs…

You seem like you know what you're talking about. A few years ago, I got a Facebook message from a girl that lived in my town. She said something like "This is really weird, but did you have shoulder surgery by X doctor last October? If so, that surgeon just did my knee and after my rehab told me that she thought you and I would be a good match. Would you want to grab dinner sometime?" I was really confused. Wasn't t…

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/filing-a-complaint/index.html
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