A short conversation with a bank • Hacker News Board

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#141

Post by bfdm » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

professoretc wrote: post #135

monktastic1 wrote: post #22

A short conversation with Blue Shield of California last month: BS: Have a question? Ask us via this very useful secure messaging form! Me: Great! Can you explain the difference between these two arcane out-of-pocket limits that you display that are un-Googleable and nowhere in your documentation that I can never find anyway? BS: Sure! We will wait two days and then send you an email suggestively titled "a response t…

> get treated by the wrong doctor at the right hospital! In California, this shouldn't happen. If you go to an in-network hospital, all care providers you see are required to bill you at the in-network rate.

Great, now just do the same thing for making all hospitals in the state (and later the nation) forced to bill at "in network" rates. then with a final step of capping the premiums paid according to income with the rest automatically covered by social programs, the USA might finally get to something sort of like a sane healthcare system.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#142

Post by pinko » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

compiler-guy wrote: post #77

dylan604 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this is a joke, or a serious attempt at telling us how good a company is by someone that drank the kool-aid. 2 days to receive answer to a simple question? Responded via secure message? What does that entail?

Email is unencrypted by default, and although private secure message systems like this are annoying to work with, they do avoid that problem.

Agreed; an ugly but reasonable solution to a real problem. However! I wish they'd put a URL in the email which brought you directly to the message in question once you logged in, rather than forcing you to navigate through the whole web UI and messaging system to find it. They never do that.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#143

Post by rebeccaskinner » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

cantrevealname wrote: post #62

> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought Wow, he's right. The item name no longer appears on emailed receipts I receive from Amazon as of about late 2019 or early 2020. I can't think of a plausible explanation for this change other than preventing Google from pilfering your detailed purchase his…

Another plausible explanation is that omitting the items you bought means that you have to log back into Amazon and look at your purchase history to see what you ordered. That gives amazon several more touch points to get you to buy more things, including the "buy it again" button that they put on the page for particular items. It also makes it more difficult for you to search for the name of something you bought in the past to order it from a different retailer.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#144

Post by Tijdreiziger » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:29 PM UTC

monktastic1 wrote: post #90

salawat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow. Blue Cross hosed that? Max Out of Pocket: This is the yearly maximum accumulation that an insured individual must pay before the insurer takes on full financial responsibility for subsequent claims. This comes in generally one of two flavors: a family or individual. The individual is straightforward. If you have a MOOP of $1000, and you've paid out $1000 in copays or coinsurance after meeting your deductible…

https://imgur.com/a/t7M2RGv When I called, I was told that it's there to show that the OOP max for in-network and out-of-network providers isn't summed to get my total OOP max; instead it's just equal to my OON OOP max. (Of course, this plan makes it hard to go bankrupt, unlike all ACA plans. That was a bit of literary liberty.)

Excuse me -- your yearly deductible is $10,000? Here I thought €385 was a lot...

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#145

Post by hooksfordays » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:35 PM UTC

cantrevealname wrote: post #62

> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought Wow, he's right. The item name no longer appears on emailed receipts I receive from Amazon as of about late 2019 or early 2020. I can't think of a plausible explanation for this change other than preventing Google from pilfering your detailed purchase his…

Another explanation I’m predisposed to, due to personal involvement: I was on the Shop[1] team when it was transitioning from Arrive to Shop, and shifting from a package tracking application to a shopping cart. If you gave the app access to read your emails, we’d scan for tracking #s but also parse through emails from Amazon to pull data about what you ordered straight into the app, so you could track everything from one place. Shortly after Shop started gaining major traction in late 2019/early 2020, Amazon started pulling more and more details from their order confirmation emails, and we were less and less able to provide actionable info on your Amazon orders until they finally put the entire order behind a login, and all we could tell you in the Shop app was you had placed an order at Amazon.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-tracker/id1...

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#146

Post by Tijdreiziger » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

pjdesno wrote: post #15

Best part: "but did you write it in rust?" Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?" A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there, we just rent that space to piss you all off, as a visible…

Dutch banks:

Q: Well, at least I can still withdraw and deposit money there, right?

A: Actually, if you want to deposit coinage, we've outsourced that to home improvement stores instead.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#147

Post by hooksfordays » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

hooksfordays wrote: post #145

cantrevealname wrote: post #62

> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought Wow, he's right. The item name no longer appears on emailed receipts I receive from Amazon as of about late 2019 or early 2020. I can't think of a plausible explanation for this change other than preventing Google from pilfering your detailed purchase his…

Another explanation I’m predisposed to, due to personal involvement: I was on the Shop[1] team when it was transitioning from Arrive to Shop, and shifting from a package tracking application to a shopping cart. If you gave the app access to read your emails, we’d scan for tracking #s but also parse through emails from Amazon to pull data about what you ordered straight into the app, so you could track everything from…

Slightly unrelated, we noticed this happening _before_ we renamed the app in the App Store from Arrive to Shop, but after the rename happened in, I think, March of 2020, negative reviews about the missing Amazon data started flooding in. People associated the name/design change with the degraded experience, when really the experience had already been degraded for a couple months by that point. The initial rebrand only changed mostly superficial things, like colours and the name!

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#148

Post by mattwilsonn888 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #143

cantrevealname wrote: post #62

> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought Wow, he's right. The item name no longer appears on emailed receipts I receive from Amazon as of about late 2019 or early 2020. I can't think of a plausible explanation for this change other than preventing Google from pilfering your detailed purchase his…

Another plausible explanation is that omitting the items you bought means that you have to log back into Amazon and look at your purchase history to see what you ordered. That gives amazon several more touch points to get you to buy more things, including the "buy it again" button that they put on the page for particular items. It also makes it more difficult for you to search for the name of something you bought in…

Seems incompatible. Making you log-in to advertise is a far less effective option than the ability to advertise products to you while you voluntarily use another service, i.e. your email. They could easily do the same adverts and quick order links from your email, but targeted adverts in your inbox is useful information to Google, maybe even better than purchase history since the recommendation work is already completed.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#149

Post by monktastic1 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

professoretc wrote: post #135

monktastic1 wrote: post #22

A short conversation with Blue Shield of California last month: BS: Have a question? Ask us via this very useful secure messaging form! Me: Great! Can you explain the difference between these two arcane out-of-pocket limits that you display that are un-Googleable and nowhere in your documentation that I can never find anyway? BS: Sure! We will wait two days and then send you an email suggestively titled "a response t…

> get treated by the wrong doctor at the right hospital! In California, this shouldn't happen. If you go to an in-network hospital, all care providers you see are required to bill you at the in-network rate.

Unfortunately, I don't actually live in California.

Re: A short conversation with a bank

#150

Post by monktastic1 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #144

monktastic1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://imgur.com/a/t7M2RGv When I called, I was told that it's there to show that the OOP max for in-network and out-of-network providers isn't summed to get my total OOP max; instead it's just equal to my OON OOP max. (Of course, this plan makes it hard to go bankrupt, unlike all ACA plans. That was a bit of literary liberty.)

Excuse me -- your yearly deductible is $10,000? Here I thought €385 was a lot...

No, the deductible is much lower. This is the maximum I can spend out of pocket in a year. But most ACA ("Obamacare") plans have no maximum for our of network providers.