The real death panels is the health insurance industry. Disgusting the number of people that die each year from 100% curable illnesses purely in the name of profit. Saw a statistic from the CDC that it is in the 70-80k range a year
They probably count in a way to lower the actual numbers. I once contracted for a time with a major carrier, and that is exactly what they do.
Probably not even panels, just some actuary making tables.
I absolutely love the doctors and health care workers that know exactly how to get around the insurance bullshit. The LGBT center I went to for all my recommendations for top surgery (letters, minimum amount of therapy, blah blah) knew the exact guidelines to get coverage and had extreme malicious compliance.
I’m not sure if this is still the case, but at the time I got surgery you needed a minimum of 2 letters from different mental health professionals and a letter from your doctor all confirming that yes, you have the trans, and surgery is both a good idea and medically necessary for you (you can see how this can be a bitch to get done if you don’t do it through an LGBT center). But the guidelines don’t say that you can’t see both of those mental health professionals at the same time with a bunch of other trans people, so that’s what they do. At the end of the 6 or so group sessions you’ve spent a lot of time talking about what to expect with surgery and talking with other trans people.
And honestly the group therapy format was probably WAY more helpful than wasting time/money with two therapists on a one-on-one basis while trying to figure out if they’re actually going to give a letter for surgery or not.
… you have the trans …
This made me consider exhaling gently through my nose.
Now this actually is a heartwarming story, setting aside the need to do all these things in the first place. Congrats on your gender-affirming care!
My wife at one time worked as a sort of–well you’d call her a malicious compliance specialist. Her fulltime RN job at the care center where she worked was to write plans of care. Basically the doctors would tell her what they intended to do, and she’d write up documentation phrased in the precise way that would get an insurer to approve it. That was her job. Just the phrasing. Occasionally she’d have to go back to a doctor and say “Hey, they won’t approve this unless X condition is also true, can you please write down that X condition is also true,” and then they did that. (This wasn’t frequently necessary, because the doctors were also very well-versed in working around the insurance system.)
I work as hired hands for satan himself (not directly for insurance companies but a consulting company specializing intelling pharma companies how to market themselves to insurance companies) and the industry is a shit show across the board.
The entire system is for-profit. Hospital systems make money by getting as much from insurance companies as possible. Pharmaceutical companies make money by selling drugs to insurance companies for as much money as they can. And the companies that hold the purse strings are the insurance companies of course (definitely the most evil).
Why is everything so damn expensive? Well, pharmaceutical company creates drug X and in order to recoup years of R&D and the strict rigor of government regulation, they need to charge a LOT of money—high skilled/high salaries positions to develop the drugs, many years clinical trials (most of which fail), government regulation, market strategy/assessment etc. You can’t get to the finish line without dumping a shit ton of money into development. So yeah, new drugs cost a lot. This doesn’t excuse corporate greed or all the schemes to keep exclusivity on a drug in order to maintain a monopoly, which is rampant and makes the situations worse.
New groundbreaking rare cancer treatment comes out—$1 million per patient. All the diseases that are easily treated with a pill are gone. So you’re left with rare disorders or ones requiring cutting edge treatment with a much much smaller market. So they have to charge an extraordinary amount to be profitable. Pharma companies don’t price drugs based on who can’t afford it, so they price it based on well insured patients that can. Insurance companies also can’t pay for everyone, so they come up with limits and preexisting conditions.
Meanwhile hospital systems, like any other corporation, seek profits by cutting costs, consolidating expenses (your treatment) and charging as much as they can for your treatment. What the public isn’t aware of is that when negotiating prices, hospital systems come up with an inflated menu of costs as a bargaining chip. So that MRI that is listed as $5,000 a pop doesn’t is negotiated down behind closed door’s with insurance companies (in-network vs out-of-network). But what price do you pay when you don’t have insurance or your insurance company doesn’t want to pay it? You guessed it!
Insurance companies pay for the whole lot and they too are out there to make money by NOT paying so they can hold onto your insurance premiums.
Oh and let us not forget that manufacturers operate at a global scale and all those countries that have single payer systems do the reasonable thing (this does include Medicare and Medicaid too) and tell everyone that they will only pay a fair price based on Real World Evidence. Guess who picks up the slack? USA! Greatest country in the fucking world, with congress paid for by everyone of these corporations.
The US are the only suckers on earth who still have to pay their insurance after they’ve met their deductible. Why y’all allow this (collectively) to happen is beyond me.
This is like asking why the women of Afghanistan don’t just stand up to the repressive Taliban regime. We’re under a repressive regime, just a very different flavor or repression.
I mean, if you want to compare the most powerful, rich, and developed nation on earth to a totalitarian Afghanistan, that’s cool with me,
Just because it’s powerful, rich, and developed does not preclude it also being repressive.
Because we would rather die than let those folks have healthcare. Fill in the fucking blank what that is.
This is just depressing man
‘Your depression will not be covered as it’s a pre-existing condition’
Health insurance CEOs everywhere.
Luckily the government stepped in to fix that problem by requiring everyone to buy health insurance. Wait…?
They don’t all deserve to die.
I mean… we should spare one or two of them so they can live to tell their cautionary tale to any new would-be parasites.
Definitely redistribute all of their assets, though.
Frame Canada: Wendell Potter spent decades scaring Americans. About Canada. He worked for the health insurance industry, and he knew that if Americans understood Canadian-style health care, they might… like it. So he helped deploy an industry playbook for protecting the health insurance agency. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada
Patients don’t have much hope arguing with insurance companies but doctors do - they just have to be more aggressive than the average doctor.
First, they have to get through to a doctor on the insurer’s side - eventually, once you go up the claim management tree, these insurance companies leave the ultimate decision up to a doctor that they pay a shitload of money to have profitable medical opinions on their behalf.
Here is the thing: It is malpractice to diagnose and recommend treatment for a patient you have not evaluated, so the only valid medical opinion on the record is your physician’s medical opinion.
You just need a doctor on your side who will raise the stakes high enough to threaten their doctor’s medical license.
At that point, the insurance doctor will cave and approve the claim.
You still need a diagnosis and a treatment plan that is backed by medical science, of course.
This sure helps, but I’ve had a couple of doctors who have fought quite hard for me against insurance companies and failed. The support of your own personal physician is not a guarantee that you will get covered.
It is amazing how they can just get away with just denying everything and it comes on you to get them to do their job.
If it is any help what I do when a claim is denied from my kids is get the agent on the phone with the medical receptionist and say the most vile things I can think of. Usually works. Also if you ever get a medical bill just rip it up and mail it back to them.
Removed by mod
was that made by the fuckin’ captain underpants guy
MBA peanut counters straight out of their undergrad and MBA programs with no functional work experience making decisions like this all day long saying “I’m gunna show muh boss how I can save da company muhney. Hurr hurr”
This is when my head plays Metallica’s Sad but true
I believe the the title of this post is a threat of violence and OP should be banned forever. That is if we are playing by reddit rules.
Good thing this isn’t reddit. Also, OP is right. They aren’t actively calling for harm against them, only stating that they deserve death, which I agree with. Anyone who makes a conscious decision to cause the suffering and death of another person, most particularly doing so purely in the pursuit of profit, deserves whatever is coming to them. I’m not going to show up and murder these people but I also won’t be too disappointed to hear that someone else did.
In the words of Mark Twain, “I have never wished a man death, but I have read some obituaries with great satisfaction.”
That said… point taken. I’d prefer if we didn’t call it out so coarsely. This one is toeing the line of “Won’t someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?” and we shouldn’t invite calls to violence.
90% of the people working in health insurance are entry level customer support workers who A, probably don’t have many options on where to work because that job is fucking awful and no one stays in it that doesn’t need to, and 2, have absolutely no authority whatsoever to approve or deny anything, don’t give one rat fuck about their employer’s money and would blanket approve every claim if they could, and are just trying to get through another fucking miserable day.
Op says they deserve death.
“Clearly OP doesn’t mean THEM” you might say. “He only means the executives with the authority!” I’ve been the miserable fucking front line guy before, and for the crime of trying to help strangers on the Internet fight their insurance company I have received more death threats than I can count on my hands. I’ve been told to kill myself. That I deserve horrible mutilation. That simply having a job at a third party that handles health insurance calls I wasv just as guilty for every dealth at the hands of the instance company as the CEO himself, as were the thousands of others just trying to scrape by taking a shitty job at a call center because it was the only one that paid enough they could pay most of their bills on time.
have absolutely no authority whatsoever to approve or deny anything,
Then these are explicitly not the people I am talking about. The ones implementing the policies that cause prices of medication to skyrocket and then denying that same life saving medication to the people who require it, are the people I’m talking about. This situation isn’t nobody’s fault. It was caused by people and those people deserve whatever karma has in store for them.
The easy answer for the wage slaves is to say “just work somewhere else” but I’ve been desperate enough before that I know that’s not always an option. I have no beef with those guys. Clocking a 9-5 and going home isn’t the great evil that’s being called out here.
I’m sorry you had to live through that and, honestly, while I don’t consider my perspective to be changed I do respect what you’re saying here. People who threaten violence on call center workers are idiots. But you have to admit that their fear and anger has a legitimate source.
Think of it this way. If every person who worked for an insurance company was actively targeted then no one would want to work for an insurance company. Therefore completely dismantling the insurance system.
This is an example of people not blaming the right people at the right level. It’s a very good example of rich people setting working class people against each other as if they’re not in fact basically goats making the mill go round. It’s a job. A livelihood for them. It’s not like 80 or so percent of them are management people who actively have any control whatsoever. I agree with your sentiment. This is absurdist and it’s just another example of that meme where the rich guy with all the cookies tells the middle class guy that the foreigner is stealing his cookie.
Being genuine, titles and posts like don’t make Lemmy endearing as a platform. It’s an unethical and downright cruel thing that shouldn’t exist as a business, but wishing the employees death as if they’re Nazis or Martin Shkreli is over the line.
as if they’re Nazis or Martin Shkreli
Well that’s just offensive to Nazis.
It’s funny because it’s true.
