EldritchFeminity @ EldritchFeminity @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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1,239

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2 yr. ago

I wonder how long it'll be until police start collecting casings with "just a joke" written on them.

It was even worse before the ACA. Before then, insurance could kick you off your plan for no reason and refuse to cover new users for pre-existing conditions.

In practice, the way this worked was quite simple: You got cancer, your insurance canceled your plan, and then they would refuse to give you a new plan because you had a pre-existing condition - cancer.

Somebody in another thread yesterday pointed out how those stats are also after appeals are accounted for. So it's not all the stuff they denied, but the stuff that they denied again after doctors and patients went through the appeal process. They had worked in appeals at another health insurance company, and said that the only way you could see denial rates that high were if UHC were denying almost everything that wasn't a standard checkup like an annual physical.

In fact, it's discouraged in many states.

As cruel as it is, I can't help but make the joke

Thoughts and prayers.

Did you appeal it? Insurance companies bank on people not appealing when they get denied, even if their policy should cover it.

The older I get and the more I learn about health insurance, the more I realize how accurate that scene from the beginning on The Incredibles with the little old lady really is. I just saw somebody last night say how most claims that are appealed get approved except for cases of incorrectly submitted forms by hospitals and the like, and pretty much all hospitals are required to have a financial assistance program that can end up getting potentially 100% of any debt you have from a procedure absolved. Insurance companies make their money by making the system as difficult to get through as possible, but if you know how to deal with it, you can save yourself tons of money (at the expense of jumping through plenty of hoops).

Somebody posted a graph of the stats in another thread, and there was a great follow-up by somebody who had worked in claims at another company about just how bad those stats really were.

The national average for denied claims is 16%. UHC denies 39% of claims. The real kicker here, as they pointed out, is that this is after appeals. They worked at some branch of Blue Cross, which sits at 17% of claims, and said how most claims that are appealed are approved and that the vast majority of those that are denied are things like chiropractors putting in claims for procedures that end up being malpractice or stuff where the paperwork was wrong. Basically, if you get something denied by insurance, you're almost guaranteed to get it approved after an appeal. They said that for UHC to hit the numbers that they do, they would effectively have to deny almost every claim that they get that isn't a routine medical visit like an annual physical.

An assassination is when the victim is wealthy enough for the police to care.

Honestly, I think you're spot on that not everyone got the memo. It feels to me like a game of telephone where people argued against women choosing the bear with logic and statistics, and then people came along to defend the original group using post hoc logic and statistics to justify choosing the bear. And both groups completely lost the context along the way that it's not about the statistical chance of being mauled by a bear vs a man, but about the 20% of women who will be sexually assaulted in their life and the culture that perpetuates and supports these conditions.

They would, but UHC deemed it unnecessary care and denied their claim.

I heard my first Christmas Carol on the radio the second week of September this year. I'm ready to burn it all down.

The entire question itself I don't think was ever meant to hold up to any analysis. It's more about making a statement on how threatened women feel in public. Bear attacks are rare while women are acutely aware of how dangerous being out in public feels. Roughly 20% will be sexually assaulted at least once, half of them before the age of 18, and that number jumps up to somewhere around 40% for trans women specifically, but the stats don't account for the cultural pressure that's exerted on every other woman outside of the victims by things like victim blaming and the way that men act in regards to women and their bodies. A simple look at current American politics is a perfect example of why women would "choose the bear."

The whole thing kind of reminds me of the question about the walrus and the fairy that went around Tumblr earlier this year. It doesn't matter what the stats say about the likelihood of a fairy being the one knocking at your door. More people would be surprised to find the walrus on their doorstep because at least with a fairy, you just have to accept that magic exists and not figure out how the walrus got there or learned how to knock on your door.

I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them.

I think this is also true for why people gravitate towards places like Bluesky in more general terms as well. Without even getting into the details of whether or not a platform has an algorithm or whatever other features, whether or not a platform is federated means nothing to the average person and the benefits of the decentralized servers are a disadvantage to onboarding people. When the Reddit exodus happened, I was describing Lemmy to a friend, and when I told him that anybody could spin up their own instance, his response was "why the hell would anybody want to do that." And this is a guy who ran his own TeamSpeak server for like 20 years.

People don't want an alternative to Twitter - they want Twitter without the rightwing extremism. Bluesky offers exactly this with an easy and straightforward onboarding process and a familiar UI. There's even browser extensions to search the people you follow on Twitter and find their Bluesky handles to make the swap easier.

I've also seen people praising Bluesky's algorithm being entirely optional as well as a plus for discoverability. People really like the chronological timeline that doesn't bury posts - especially artists. I haven't used Mastodon, and I only used Twitter because all the artists jumped ship after Tumblr banned the porn, but I can say that I have enjoyed how Bluesky works similar to Tumblr in that regard. I've never liked algorithmic based feeds, so a chronological feed of the people I follow and the stuff they reblog from other people who I can then go check out as well is exactly the kind of experience I want out of a platform.

Yeah, takes like this are crazy. Is the government my enemy? In the sense that we're spiraling towards a fascist regime with an incoming administration that has members who have literally called for "a genocide of trans people," absolutely.

But that's an issue of the government falling apart due to the kinds of people who would be the warmongers lording over the Libertarian paradise that most of these people call for with their PMC, not because the government simply exists. And this branch in particular is one of the ones doing the most to protect the common person from those same warmonger wannabes.

Without branches like this, companies would be dumping chemical waste upriver of towns again.

No, but having it be justified by a portion of the population with violent tendencies makes it easy to avoid getting in trouble with the law for doing. You say that you're getting rid of worker safety programs and bringing back child labor, and people start asking questions. You say that the children yearn for the mines but the woke won't let them, and half the country will start punching elementary teachers for not letting kids get Black Lung.

Basically, it's a combo of the two. They get to do the things that they want to do anyway, and they get support from a group of people trying to destroy regulations simply for doing it.

You mean the best Christmas movie?

It's the perfect excuse to cut back on funding expenditures and increase cronyism, and that's all the justification that they need.

I haven't heard somebody use the word "murring" in like a decade. Methinks they're farther down the pipeline than they want to admit.

Yeah, pretty much what I was getting at. We live in a country where everybody believes themselves to be the hero in their own Rambo style action movie.

It was also opposed by George Washington on the argument that "A bunch of farmers with guns will never defeat a trained army." He basically did exactly that, but it took the support of one of the world's largest super powers at the time in order to do it - France.

Not to say don't arm yourself. I plan on doing exactly that myself. But don't expect to be overthrowing the dictatorship to come. There are no resistance groups being armed by the EU here.