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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

#231

Post by fencepost »

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.

There's no HIPAA breach in the publishing of the article unless the information is being provided by a covered entity or business associate. Most notably, patients can disclose anything they desire about themselves.

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

#232

Post by fencepost »

liveoneggs wrote: post #218
Clubber wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep it around $2000 to $3000, so it's not high for me. We go to the doctor about once or twice a year for random stuff, so it doesn't make financial sense to have a zero to low deductible. I want to protect from the hospital bills from something major though, like a car wreck. I'm not sure that those $50 copay per doctor visit right from the start are even available anymore. That's the insurance I had when I was a…

if you have the legally-defined type of HDHP that could explain your bills because in HDHP-world you pay everything up-front until you reach your out-of-pocket yearly deductible (hopefully offset by using the HSA's tax savings; my job offers matching on HSA contributions that offset the premium cost entirely) I pay (a lot) extra for a traditional PPO and get the old-fashioned $20/$50/$75 deductible.

If purchasing insurance through the Exchanges my experience was that this is not really clear unless you're paying attention to the exact phrasing in 1-2 places.

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

#233

Post by danso »

jessaustin wrote: post #217
danso wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can google for the exact phrase, "Very poor and crooked business practice", which is attributed to her review of the doctor.

If it's that simple, how do we know that she, rather than e.g. someone at the gynecologist's office, wrote this review?

Because it's unlikely someone in the gynecologist's office traveled back in time to 2014 to when the Yellowpages.com review is stated as being written?

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

#234

Post by ceejayoz »

fencepost wrote: post #231
ceejayoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no HIPAA breach in the publishing of the article unless the information is being provided by a covered entity or business associate. Most notably, patients can disclose anything they desire about themselves.

The patient claims the following in the article:

> [The doctor's office] 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.

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

#235

Post by ceejayoz »

confiscate wrote: post #189
ceejayoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why do you blame the tabloid? The quote said "They posted my", so it looks likely that it was the woman who said it, no?

> why do you blame the tabloid?

Because a common tabloid tactic is posting technically true statements in a misleading manner.

For example, the woman's statement could apply to having introduced her medical records into the court transcripts, which would be entirely normal practice. The wording in the article leaves us thinking they uploaded her records and driver's license in a Yelp reply or something, but I think that's unlikely.

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

#236

Post by Nadya »

alexbanks wrote: post #191
Nadya wrote: 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…

I work in a tech-related healthcare field where I'm required to undergo HIPAA training and (often) end up needing to educate clients on potential violation risks. Nowhere as good as a lawyer but I deal with it on a daily basis at least. So take this as the typical "I am not your lawyer or pretending to be a lawyer - go speak with an actual lawyer" disclaimer.

>Wasn't this a HIPAA violation?

100% yes that was a HIPAA violation and honestly anything shy of giving your information to people who actually need it (aka: any hospital/practitioner you visit who should be aware of your medical history) is a violation with very few exceptions (mostly legal ones). Gossiping about patients is probably one of the most common violations.

>If yes, what do you even do about it?

Depends how much you care and how long it has been since the event happened and you became aware of the violation. If it happened within the last 6 months you can report it online through the process xapata linked you. If it's been over 6 months it's too late to report. I'm not sure if "it happened but I didn't know it was a violation until recently" counts as a start date for the "aware of the occurrence" limitation. Would be a great question for an actual lawyer.

You also don't know what else could possibly have been said about you or your medical history - so I'd keep that in mind when deciding if this violation is a "big deal" to you personally or not.

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

#237

Post by kbp »

jessaustin wrote: post #224
danso wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this was not just a disgruntled customer. She's accused of posting multiple reviews that say allegedly libelous things. This was not, according to the complaint, a situation where someone just left a bad review.

So she is "super-disgruntled". If anything that makes fighting with her even more foolish. Most of these sites (certainly yelp and google) allow service providers to respond to reviews. Leave a single note, "We're sorry this patient wasn't satisfied with our service, and have refunded all fees. Since most of our patients are happy, we rarely need to do this." [0] Actually even that note is too confrontational, but ma…

> Leave a single note, "We're sorry this patient wasn't satisfied with our service, and have refunded all fees. Since most of our patients are happy, we rarely need to do this." [0] Actually even that note is too confrontational

She accused him of committing felonious fraud; seeing the doctor respond by giving her her money back and saying "most people don't have a problem" would not cast that doctor in a good light at all, to me. I'm not really sure if there's any kind of response they could have left that would feel reassuring to me: recommending the client contact law enforcement like someone else suggested might help a little, but not that much. The presence of a review with accusations like that that the doctor shrugged off or dealt with casually would be infinitely more offputting to me than hearing the doctor had previously won a libel case against a former client.

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

#238

Post by droidist2 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #147
blanderman wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I contend that all tabloids are disreputable.

Well technically tabloids are just newspapers of a certain size.

Right, there's a big difference between tabloids like The NY Post, "red tops" like The Sun, and supermarket tabloids like The National Enquirer.

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

#239

Post by retsibsi »

dmitrygr wrote: post #122
coding123 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a civil case obviously, so all that jail stuff won't apply to this, but just curious... If cheap litigation is 20K, and "battling out with a judge" is 100K how come the first time I'm hearing about this is in a HN comment? Seems like no one is going up to bat against this stuff until it affects them. Reminds me of that famous poem "First they came for the ..."

Good point. In civil cases the equivalent is a "settlement offer". Made famous my the RIAA. Pay us $5000/song you downloaded or we'll sue you for $5 million, and you cannot afford that. We might not win, but if we do, you're boned!

> We might not win, but if we do, you're boned!

Isn't it worse than that -- more like 'we might not win, but you're probably boned either way'? I may be wrong but I have the impression that it's relatively rare to be awarded full costs, and anyway you'll have to pay your lawyers up front.

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

#240

Post by jessaustin »

kbp wrote: post #237
jessaustin wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So she is "super-disgruntled". If anything that makes fighting with her even more foolish. Most of these sites (certainly yelp and google) allow service providers to respond to reviews. Leave a single note, "We're sorry this patient wasn't satisfied with our service, and have refunded all fees. Since most of our patients are happy, we rarely need to do this." [0] Actually even that note is too confrontational, but ma…

> Leave a single note, "We're sorry this patient wasn't satisfied with our service, and have refunded all fees. Since most of our patients are happy, we rarely need to do this." [0] Actually even that note is too confrontational She accused him of committing felonious fraud; seeing the doctor respond by giving her her money back and saying "most people don't have a problem" would not cast that doctor in a good light…

Let's stipulate that there is nothing the physician could say in response to a fraud accusation that would cause you personally to doubt that accusation. That seems a novel combination of the judgmental and the credulous, but life takes all sorts. It would still be better for the physician, for you to have this reaction while reading Yelp than for hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers to be reading TFA.
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