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UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

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Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#131

Post by lijok »

What a poorly designed system. If the insurer truly prioritizes client care as they claim, why on earth would the doctors contracted to review the treatments of the insured, have access to the insurance policies? Shouldn't the output of their review simply be whether or not the treatment seems appropriate, period? Why are the doctors weighing their review against the insurers policies?

Honestly, this just seems like incompetence at multiple levels in a highly complex system. All it takes is one bad apple paying more attention to the bottom line than client care, for the entire system to magnificently cascade into an absolute shitshow.

If you read through the entire article without prejudice, most of the decisions made along the way make sense, with a couple of process failures and incompetent or indifferent individuals sprinkled in along the way, and the end result is a client who has to plan bathroom stops for a 5 minute walk, being told to take a treatment they know will kill them, or pound sound.

This is the kind of systemic cascading failure that can only be addressed by the person at the top having a come to jesus moment.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#132

Post by laimewhisps »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
iwontberude wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghoulish? Internet? Have you spoken to regular people not terminally online? They have no sympathy for the CEO. I had sympathy for him as a human and a worker, but his behavior was beyond the pale and unfortunately rule of law doesn’t exist in the US.

> Have you spoken to regular people not terminally online? They have no sympathy for the CEO Everyone I have spoken to has no sympathy for him as a CEO but sympathy for him as a human. He is wrong and the healthcare system is broken. But this was also murder. If your sense of empathy is so fucked that you’re pro murder, you need to speak to a professional. (If you’re struggling with this and don’t want to let hate tu…

He was killing people though, and if his death stops that, it's a net positive. His life is not worth more than the thousands he has ended for personal profit.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#133

Post by joecool1029 »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #91
ct520 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I believe he is referring to is Jury nullification. I interpret your statement of open and shut case as you believe jury must convict if what they interpret to be facts of breaking a laws written by man. By a jury choosing not to convict there is another form of justice implied…

What about this case leads you to believe the shooter was in the right or that the law was unjust? It seems like premeditated murder caught on camera.

There's precedent in NYC for jury nullification happening in a case like this: https://www.jta.org/archive/many-stunned-by-verdict-acquitti...

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#134

Post by pixelatedindex »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
iwontberude wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghoulish? Internet? Have you spoken to regular people not terminally online? They have no sympathy for the CEO. I had sympathy for him as a human and a worker, but his behavior was beyond the pale and unfortunately rule of law doesn’t exist in the US.

> Have you spoken to regular people not terminally online? They have no sympathy for the CEO Everyone I have spoken to has no sympathy for him as a CEO but sympathy for him as a human. He is wrong and the healthcare system is broken. But this was also murder. If your sense of empathy is so fucked that you’re pro murder, you need to speak to a professional. (If you’re struggling with this and don’t want to let hate tu…

> But this was also murder. If your sense of empathy is so fucked that you’re pro murder, you need to speak to a professional.

A quote comes to mind - “I do not wish death upon another human, but I have read some obituaries with great delight”. This is one of those instances.

I have more sympathy for his family than him - he did not have to choose this line of work. Do people have sympathy for Bin Laden or other terrorists? If they don’t, do they need to see a therapist?

Anecdotally, the only people that I’ve spoken to who has sympathy are other extremely well off individuals who have questionable ethics. I also think it’s interesting that because the victim is an elite, there’s a sense of justice from other elites that is not there when a common man is shot and killed.

The whole thing is a double standard on multiple levels.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#135

Post by AtlasBarfed »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
iwontberude wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghoulish? Internet? Have you spoken to regular people not terminally online? They have no sympathy for the CEO. I had sympathy for him as a human and a worker, but his behavior was beyond the pale and unfortunately rule of law doesn’t exist in the US.

> Have you spoken to regular people not terminally online? They have no sympathy for the CEO Everyone I have spoken to has no sympathy for him as a CEO but sympathy for him as a human. He is wrong and the healthcare system is broken. But this was also murder. If your sense of empathy is so fucked that you’re pro murder, you need to speak to a professional. (If you’re struggling with this and don’t want to let hate tu…

Msm won't say the quiet part out loud if it involves corporate power, because msm is a corporate power themselves.

Everyone who has stepped in a hospital as provider or patient knows an insurance executives job is to quietly kill hundreds to thousands of people a year and profit from it.

Of course there's oil companies, cigarettes, alcohol, guns, weapons, and a lot of other industries that do this.

Because the real quiet part of capitalism is that its valuation of human life is very very very small unless they have money. Have many criticisms of economics, but this is the biggest one. Capital owned/controlled by a human is all that is valued, otherwise you are zero or negative.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#136

Post by Winblows11 »

polalavik wrote: post #92
BadHumans wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After redditing i found a thread where you can find a manufacturers coupon on the manufacturers website. After knowing this seemingly secret hidden trick the medicine was $50. My doctor didnt know about that, my insurance didnt either. Absolutely insane. This is GoodRx's business model in a nutshell. I used them when I didn't have insurance and saved a ton on medicine.

i just looked up the medication on goodrx [1]. still listed as ~$5000 when there is still a $50 coupon [2] [1] https://www.goodrx.com/dificid [2] https://www.merckconnect.com/dificid/coupon/

Interesting I Google'd this and it costs NHS in UK £1,350 GBP aka $1,719.22 USD for same 20 pills at same dosage (document dated 2019)

https://gmmmg.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Fidaxomicin-...

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#137

Post by kelseyfrog »

lancesells wrote: post #108
griomnib wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve spent days reviewing comments on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, news articles, et al and I’ve never seen such a uniformity of opinion on anything in my life.

Have you seen Youtube or Reddit comments on anything? They don't reflect real-life. Youtube is probably the worst, most trollish comments of the "normal" internet and Reddit is a sort of progressive propaganda machine that will also call for the death penalty on a teenager that did something stupid (which lots of teenagers do) or a karen that was an asshole in a restaurant and isn't happy with her life. I haven't vis…

I've had conversations with real people in real life who also overwhelmingly share the sentiment. It's not an internet bubble.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#138

Post by breadwinner »

Insurance companies are hardly the only ones at fault here. Hospitals and Pharma companies are guilty of price gouging [1]. When insurance pays hospitals hike up the prices. When the patient pays (such as for cosmetic or plastic surgery) the prices charged by hospitals and doctors are more reasonable.

[1] https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2022-05-31-hospital-price-gougi...

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#139

Post by itronitron »

croissants wrote: post #72
itronitron wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inefficiency is that for many pharmaceutical companies in the US, their marketing budget is much higher than (~10X) the R&D budget.

Where are you getting 10X? If I look at, say, Merck, their "sales, general, and administrative expenses" [1] trends at even or slightly higher than their R&D expenses [2]. Abbvie's ratio is around 2x [3, 4]. AFAIK, SG&A is the number that groups criticizing pharmaceutical companies look at, even though it includes a lot of money spent on things like paying lawyers, which any pharmaceutical company that actually wants…

That's how it was described to me by several R&D staff at JnJ two decades ago.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#140

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

standardUser wrote: post #110
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments you see on the Internet are not a random sample! If there's one lesson I could drive home to everyone about media literacy, this is it. Everything you see online is intensely, competitively selected for its ability to drive engagement, and celebrating murder drives a ton of engagement precisely because it transgresses well-established and widely agreed norms. Indeed, as we've seen here, the murder drives so…

> Everything you see online is intensely, competitively selected for its ability to drive engagement Mostly you're seeing accounts/sites you follow and choose to view and often those accounts have a consistent set of commenters. It's not like you log and the internet shows you entirely random things every time.

If you're viewing "Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, news articles, et al", that's usually not so. Each of these platforms optimize their default views to show you the content they expect will be most engaging, although the first three apply some algorithmic filtering to try and make the content engaging to you in particular rather than the average viewer.

Equally importantly, the content that gets produced is subject to this same filter. If you think the killer was justified, or you think the impulse to justify the killer shows everything that's wrong with America, you'll be excited to go write out a banger Tweet on the topic. If you have the boring, conventional view that all murders are tragic and you hope killers are brought to justice for the sake of the victim's friends and family, it's not going to occur to you to comment on this particular one.

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