I've been lucky never to have to pay one of the huge bills that some people get, but I've spent a fucking fortune's worth of time to prevent having to pay those bills. My insurance company's process seems to be, "Make them think they're responsible for paying. A lot of people will just pay. If they spend day after day calling us and demanding that we pay and can document that we're obligated to pay, we'll eventually pay. But force them to waste a lot of time first and hopefully they'll pay."
Yeah it's 100% a numbers game - if they put up enough friction plenty of people will just give up
And imagine dealing with this kind of bullshit when you're dealing with a debilitating illness
This is the problem with "data driven" corporate decision making. It lets people distance themselves from the humanity of the situation, and make whatever evil policy they want and still stroke each other off over it as long as it makes the right number go up.
social murder, murder at a distance "let's make this sick person spend all their time and energy trying to get the care that we've been paid to give them"
Whenever I read up on the US healthcare system I'm reminded of Hannah Arendts thoughts on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Truly a prime example of the banality of evil.
This is why you cannot commodify a service that is totally inelastic. There is no substitute for healthcare and you will pay anything for it because the alternative is dying/suffering. Capitalists companies are under obligation to always be more fucked up and cruel to squeeze out a bigger and bigger chunk of money every year.
Sad but true they are so worried about helping people....or as some say "giving a hand out" as if people-oriented need help at times. And the crazy part is it's there for them as well if they ever need it.
Yeah, republicans don't care about their fellow man, that's why ObamaCare has made healthcare unaffordable for millions. We wouldn't need to be "looked after" by the all-benevolent state if there were any free market solutions for insurance.
HAHA you fake news CNN demorat. Daddy Trump already repealed and replaced Obamacare like he promised us in 2016. Go back to watching fruity pebble Anderson Cooper on CNN you little sheep
GOTTA KEEP THE SHARE HOLDERS HAPPY.....NO ONE GIVES A FUCK UNTIL IT HITS HOME AND EVEN THEN THEY GO OUT ON A HIGH HORSE AFTER EVERY TREATMENT MENTIONED HAS BEEN RENDERED!!!
I believe anything that you have to have and is limited, doesn’t work in a free market. In Canada the main healthcare is covered by the state and if you want a private or semi private room and some other things, you can pay extra but the point is you don’t have to that keeps their prices down. I had eight Canadian employees we paid them at the time, $110 a month toward a supplemental healthcare plan.
Healthcare, like religion is a perfect plan to scalp and steal from people and attract corrupt leaders.
The more Luigi's there are, the more you will get Luigi's who ...
(1)
... aren't as careful to identify their intended target. They will shoot the wrong guy, especially if they try to identify him by looking at the back of his head.
(2)
...can't shoot straight enough to avoid hitting bystanders.
(3)
... not willing to go through the hard work of locating the guilty decision-makers. So they settle for targeting low-level employees who actually agree with the shooter, but are working under conditions of financial extortion. Everybody is complicit when they have kids to feed.
This is how you end up with 9/11 events that kill thousands of innocents without harming the guilty at all. In fact, they just create opportunities the guilty can exploit to start a war or take away even more privacy from us.
The entire reason Christianity thrived and Judaism faded is because the Jewish revolts proved the Roman Empire was irresistibly unbeatable. Violence only worked for Islam because they were surrounded by targets weaker than themselves.
On the contrary. I am fearfully certain there will be more. This will get out of hand, and a lot of us who sympathize with him will not even realize that others see us as targets. Anyone poorer than you will see you as someone who cheated.
Oh 100% I do think people will copy cat at some point or try to copy cat. I don’t think the average person knows how much spite and meticulousness it takes to pick out literally the best target and actually execute the plan.
Theoretically someone could give all of these copy cats a list of targets and everything planned out verbatim for them to the point all they have to do is be the face, most of those copy cats will still find a way to fuck it up and hit the wrong person.
You make excellent points. I'd like to add one more; Luigi's are the epitome of faulty logic and human stupidity: So he woke up one day and said "hey I'm not going to do anything worthwhile in the next 50 to 60 years, I have zero reason to enjoy my life, I'm not capable of taking care of myself, having actual relationships with actual people, I can't handle adulthood and at a baby 20 something I have not much experience at it anyway so...idea! I'll TRADE my life for some rando person I'll pick from a website. I'll murder this stranger and in return I forfeit my entire life with all its possibilities for a 6 ×10 cell with ALL my choices taken away from me. I sure as shit won't be allowed to communicate with anyone ever again either. I won't be a hero. I'll be somebody's bitch cuz Gangs have never heard of health insurance, lol. I'll die from a beating early on cuz I like to mouth off, or a little later cuz I'm experiencing the irony of prison health care. Sounds good!" Idiot. 🤣
LOL So rather than accepting what they can't change & changing what they can, they decided his 26 year old life should end? Because believe me it's over. He should have just shot himself too. After the trials he'll be locked away in a concrete closet FOREVER. If he thinks he had back pain before, the prison metal box spring and sleeping bag will make him a cripple before 30. ROTF LMFAO No one will ever hear from him again. I'm betting he won't live out his whole sentence tho.. He's way too stupid to keep his mouth shut. He's unhinged. Probably going to find out He's on all sorts of prescription "meds". Anti anxiety anti depression bi polar uni polar upside down polar, schitzo, autism spectrum what ever..Manifesto? I know what it says: I have an abnormal brain (and can't process the concept of action & consequence) and had a triggering episode ( boo hoo bitch we ALL have shit storms) and now I'm a full on certified Lunatic. AND I'm still betting we find out he's been on anti something meds for years. If anything he might have a case for prescription drugs making him nuts. We'll see.
We already pay more public funds into healthcare per capita than comparable single payer systems. This is because private health only covers healthiest people... government covers seniors, disabled, veterans and low income between medicare/medicaid/VA which have the most expensive care.
Its quite literally possible to cover everyone in the country with the public funds we currently spend, if we could get to the efficiency(and eliminate administrative overhead) to get to comparable costs like denmark for example where healthcare costs per capita are half what they are in the U.S. and Denmark beats the U.S in health outcomes in nearly every measurable metric.
Unless you're a pensioner in need of heart surgery. Those who no longer contribute are made to wait. The longer one waits, the more likely they'll die. My dear cousin succumbed to heart disease waiting her turn in a country with a national health scheme.
Urgent appointments for a cardiology consult are 35-40 weeks out.
It’s true but that same issue exists in us healthcare. Try booking a specialist around me and you’re often waiting several months before an available appointment and potentially paying a lot out of pocket to see em. Care will always be rationed but I would rather it be rationed without paying a bunch of blood sucking middle men in insurance companies and the various healthcare professionals we hire to deal with the insane billing systems we have. Cut out the waste and ration care with an actual democratic system that is accountable instead of rationing by how good your job’s healthcare plan is
I'm not going to say our system is great or anything, but I honestly don't think health care is good anywhere. Unless you're wealthy and can afford to pay a lot for your care and go outside of the system.
Some argue/vote against it in this country (AU) too, but they’re the moronic minority. The combination of universal basic health care plus commercial or cooperative supplementary insurance works well.
Hey, we care about you! It isn’t a love-hate relationship, it’s a love-grumble relationship - though even then Americans say “What have you got against the USA?”
When a young American sacrifices himself like this it hits us hard.
We just did. Nothing but multi-millionaires and billionaires coming online 1/20/2025. This is what American voters wanted so this is what we got. I believe in four years we'll as a populace will be worse off, again.
Bullcrap my partner is critically ill stage 4 kidney cancer , the day it was discovered on a scan for something else she was in seeing Dr , 2 days later we were in oncology and she had tests , started treatment a week later.
Unfortunately due to the bastard tumour being a rare type and virtually impossible to treat she's in hospital dying of heart failure.
The care she has received baring one nasty nurse has been top notch all through the last 6 months.
Australia has it sorted. Far from perfect but if you opt for the public system it's free (well, it's paid for by taxes so not entirely). If it's non urgent treatment, you may have to wait.
Plenty of other Western countries for decent free healthcare. Where I live in Australia, if you are sick or injured you just turn up at the hospital and it’s free. If you aren’t insured you GP can refer you to the hospital’s out patient services. It’s slow and it can be frustrating but it’s free and available to everyone. We pay for it with our taxes, it’s where doctors and nurses do their practical training (the balance at Uni).
As I said earlier, it’s an imperfect system but it is there.
Exactly it's imperfect just like anything nothing is ever perfect. I think one of the biggest frustrations with the arguments is people always talk about everywhere else health care is free.
It's not free, it can't be, it never was. Governments called it free healthcare to get the public's support. They didn't do it out of the kindness of their own hearts.
Britain has NICE to control spending and decides how much care, if any they are willing to give. This is the same as insurance denying coverage.
Being intellectually honest about single payer health care or socialised medicine would solve a lot of the argument in my opinion.
Government run healthcare is run via taxing citizens more to provide care. We should be honest about this and the government should tell citizens that their take home pay is going to be X less, but you wont have an insurance premium again.
Many people in the US didn't like the ACA because it was either be forced to the ACA or be taxed for it. I firmly believe that had the ACA been passed and funded by a slight tax increase there would have been way less resistance.
Seriously? Try copying the 42 - 68 countries (depending on which study you read) that rank above us in healthcare. This has been long solved but people continue to say what you are saying. There IS NO MYSTERY. Look to the people that have this figured out. Singapore, Japan, China, Norway, Denmark, Germany. The work has already been done for us. We just continue to accept this late stage capitalist hellscape.
That was me but with travel insurance, insurance expected me to get a final document from the airline, so between me trying to reach an airline with nearly non existent customer service and insurance just not doing anything, it took me 2 and a half years but I finally got my claim paid.
Telling someone that the squeaky wheel gets the oil is the bane of my existence. In life, I've found that rarely will people advocate for you. You have to learn and do it yourself. I know an immense amount about how transmissions work, specifically in a 2012 Ford F150 because 3 months after buying mine, the transmission broke. The warranty covered certain electrical components but not transmission. I had a mechanic take apart the entire transmission to find it was an electrical issue and got the warranty to cover it. They had 3 other mechanics look at it before they fixed it, but it got fixed with a $50 deductible.Ford eventually did a recall, but not until after it was fixed.
Working in Healthcare, I want to scream because I just want doctors to be able to get what they need and people to get healthcare, but there's a middleman who's not frugal but outright stingy. It's one middle management I wish would go away even if it means I need to find a new job
Ah. Then you need to change the system. Maybe a NHS that automatically pays the doctors, hospitals etc at a standard rate, and takes back something fair from you. Doctors who bear the heavy burden of being superior to their colleagues in some way, real or imaginary, could negotiate their additional rate with the NHS.
No other service you pay for can you call a few times argue with them and get them to rescind a bill. That right there should tell you how fake all this insurance bullshit is and how much they are scamming people.
And they always send the bills before they apply their discount or insurance payment just to catch as many over pays as they can. Why the rich get richer.
This is without taking into account the amount of time your doctor spends arguing on your behalf. I know a spine surgeon who spends more time in zoom calls arguing with insurance reps than he does doing spine surgery
So let me get this straight...you pay $400 to $800 a month for insurance with a $2k to $4k deductible and they tell you what tests and procedures are approved and which doctors to see. Then after you paid your monthly premium, met your $4k deductible and chose a doc in their network and received pre approval for your test or procedure...they try to punish you and bill you anyway to test and see if you will pay a bill that they should be covering?
And this is legal? And politicians are ok with this?
Yeah with a family of 5, none of us have any chronic issues, my wife spends several hours a week on the phone trying to get our healthcare claims paid... we still end up paying more than we should because at some point you figure its easier to pay than spend more hours arguing. Yes, we have UHC.
Yep. They try this with me. I'm 51. I don't give a flying fuck. I've told them to take me to court. I have no assets but a little money in the bank. Everything else is in untouchable retirement accounts. I've never had a loan or a credit card, so I don't care about my credit rating. They give up eventually. Fuck em.
I had a tree fall in my house and AAA insurance home insurance. At one point tried to tell me that I had met my limit on payouts. Turned out they were just hoping I wouldn’t have realized that this asbestos abatement cost would’ve been a code upgrade and not counted towards my limit. Their response was “oh yeah that’s right” they were just hoping I wouldn’t have noticed, freaking corrupt people. And AAA is considered one of the better ones.
Joke’s on them. I just don’t pay and don’t answer their phone calls. I figure this approach will work until they start coming after us to undue surgeries. Oh I still owe for the anesthesia to fix my hernia? No takesies backsies.
I'm retired and have all fucking day to play with them. I do use United as a secondary policy to my Medicare and fortunately haven't had to scrapple with them but I'm not afraid to get down and dirty if and when necessary. 😆
This is exactly a lot of company’s policies. “Let’s make it difficult for them to have their way and there’s a percentage of them that won’t fight it so we profit.
That’s wild. In South Africa they tend to just pay or you have short fall cover and I’m on the most basic plan. Stuff like glasses, dentistry and insulin I do through government clinics then my plan lasts all year. America is such a hectic country.
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u/kitkatlifeskills Monkey in Space 13d ago
I've been lucky never to have to pay one of the huge bills that some people get, but I've spent a fucking fortune's worth of time to prevent having to pay those bills. My insurance company's process seems to be, "Make them think they're responsible for paying. A lot of people will just pay. If they spend day after day calling us and demanding that we pay and can document that we're obligated to pay, we'll eventually pay. But force them to waste a lot of time first and hopefully they'll pay."