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German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

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Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#251

Post by jjav »

greenavocado wrote: post #131
mschuster91 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High taxes with no matching value behind them That is not the case for Germany. We have - even with all its shortcomings - a decent education system that's largely free and accessible for everyone, a decent healthcare system, a decent public transport system on local, regional and federal system, and a very decent social security network that covers unemployment, pension and elderly care. The US in contrast has nei…

INOVA in Northern Virginia charges $3000 for an uncomplicated vaginal birth. They have a code which rolls up many services into that code. There are additional in-hospital expenses such as the newborn hearing test which aggregate to about $400. If you have insurance your maximum cost out of pocket for the calendar year is between 5 and 15 thousand dollars (insurance covers everything above it). If you can't pay it al…

> (insurance covers everything above it)

Be aware that this is not true!

What insurance-speak calls max out of pocket is not what a normal person thinks max out of pocket means.

If you have a year of high medical bills you can easily pay much more out of your real pocket than your so-called "max out of pocket" in the insurance paperwork.

That is because the insurance company only credits what they feel like it towards their accounting of max out of pocket, not what you actually paid.

I don't have an insurance bill handy here to quote numbers but in their monthly or quarterly statements you can find what you have to pay and what they credit against your tally of yearly out of pocket. The latter is often less than the former.

> Health insurance in America costs between $500-$1000 a month for an entire family.

You're off by a lot. About $3500/mo here in CA for my family. Employers usually pay a good portion of that (but it varies) but if you go unemployed on COBRA, it's all out of pocket.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#252

Post by mk89 »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #241
mk89 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will cause not even a fraction of the health care costs a 70 or 80 year old German generates. I can't find this stat but basically it's exponential, one generates more health care costs in the last ten years of its life than during its entire previous life, on average. I really don't wanna get into this populist debate, which is really annoying lately as it seems to be our biggest issue in the world, but ... t…

They enjoyed the golden years after WW2 where the economy was booming, decent pension starting at reasonable age, nobody cared about the environment, people lived like there's no tomorrow. Now the coming generations can deal with the fallout.

It's a bit unfair what you said and probably you know it - next generations can blame so many things on us today... it's just like history or life works.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#253

Post by mk89 »

Beijinger wrote: post #250
mk89 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a scale 1-5, 2 and 3 are exactly the same as or better than "decent". Otherwise the previous poster would have said "they are perfect (=1)". You're being a bit unfair, to be honest.

I did not say it is third world.

No but you pointed out or you wanted to point out it's not decent, yet you gave a score of 2-3 on a scale 1-5 where 1 is top. That makes it exactly decent/good, which is what the person said.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#254

Post by mk89 »

Beijinger wrote: post #249
mk89 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you live. I (and the people I know, some of them 65+) never had to wait for 6 months - even for surgeries. And I can speak about a decently wide range of categories. You also mention "at least for some categories", then you mention that "you could call the average XYZ doctor", as it that was applying to all categories. You seem to be generalising out of emotions, to be honest.

I don't have diabetes, for example. So I can't say anything about seeing such a specialist.

Then why do you say you could call the average doctor and get an appointment in 6 months?

As I mentioned, I know about a range of categories and I never heard of 6 months. Your example seems very specific.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#255

Post by jandrewrogers »

albert180 wrote: post #246
jandrewrogers wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these are primarily medical outcomes. Life expectancy, for example, is skewed by an anomalously high rate of fatal injuries when people are young, which has nothing to do with healthcare quality. For better or worse, trauma medicine in the US is arguably the best in the world because serious injuries are so prevalent. There is also the practical matter that the US is a continent-sized country and regional eff…

Uhm no, even the richest households are worse off than the poorest in UK https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...

Nothing in that article actually addresses the point. The average life expectancy where I live is currently 83+, despite notably higher fatal injury rates.

In terms of actual medical outcomes -- survival rates for cancer, cardiovascular events, trauma medicine, etc -- the UK is quite a bit worse than the US. The only countries that stand out as consistently competing on medical outcomes are France and Switzerland.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#256

Post by illiac786 »

Beijinger wrote: post #237
vizzier wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding a source to this claim as it is very valid [0]. I cannot find a good overview of the overall demographics of the ukranian refugees other than it is mostly women and children due to the borders being closed to outgoing men. Employment rates will rise as people integrate. [0] https://www.oecd.org/health/Expenditure-by-disease-age-and-g...

In Germany, 75% of Ukrainians don't work. In other EU countries, nearly 80% work. It is a question of the system and incentives.

Source? This is interesting.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#257

Post by chrisandchris »

anovikov wrote: post #85
tietjens wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello from Germany. No lies detected. Don’t forget about a working culture where process always ranks above results, and leaders commonly lack confidence to make pragmatic decisions.

Well, this working culture makes result slow and expensive, and as a result, in many cases uncompetitive, but it does a good job of avoiding fuckups and while slow and expensive, things usually get done predictably, on time and on budget. Which probably makes it better than American reckless "fake it till you make it" approach in most of the complex projects.

I think scope, budget and time is a triangle. You have to choose 2 of it, and 1 is always lost. There's almost never a on-budget, on-time and on-scope project.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#258

Post by A1kmm »

Nextgrid wrote: post #209
graemep wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies competing is the default If you had no regulation, they would simply form cartels or merge to create a monopoly.

Merging and forming cartels is still technically a choice . A company could decide not to do that and compete. It may require a near-infinite amount of money, but it's still technically possible.

In the absence of any regulation, if a company's objective is to maximise profits, and it acts as a rational actor solely focused on achieving that objective, joining cartels, and creating barriers for entry is the end state of the market for nearly all starting conditions.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#259

Post by iforgotpassword »

mk89 wrote: post #252
iforgotpassword wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They enjoyed the golden years after WW2 where the economy was booming, decent pension starting at reasonable age, nobody cared about the environment, people lived like there's no tomorrow. Now the coming generations can deal with the fallout.

It's a bit unfair what you said and probably you know it - next generations can blame so many things on us today... it's just like history or life works.

Yes I do, and I'm aware the vast majority of them were blissfully unaware, but then again I've talked to enough of them to also hsve learned that many of them simply don't want any of that to be true today. Some form of denial I guess. Like simply claiming the greenhouse effect isn't real, or protesting new wind turbine or high voltage power lines, because they would see them from their big houses with big gardens they were able to easily afford a few decades ago. Or protesting the new city district on a farmer's land because they like to ride their electric bikes along the fields - never mind even families with double income struggle to afford decent apartments nowadays, let alone a dedicated house.

Seriously, we have frequent protests against a new city district here, and you exclusively see college students who know jack shit about life and old folks around there.

Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

#260

Post by lesuorac »

shellfishgene wrote: post #141
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is incredible the amount of private information that gets exchanged in Germany to access certain things. You brought up landlords, but I've heard crazy stories about job applications or applications to services that "require" an incredible amount of private information (often even including pictures too!) handed-over for completely obscure reasons with no recourse if your application is denied or simply ignored.

Are US "background checks" any better?

There is a fundamental difference between being required to furnish the information yourself and the 2nd party asking a 3rd party for information.

If the 2nd party requires you to pay for their request to the 3rd party then I'd say there isn't a difference.

Although I mean unless you've established at least a correlation between some piece of information and say ability to pay then you really shouldn't be asking for it ...

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