Microblog Memes

Death panels?

Believe it or not, that's also Frank.

Don't be so sure it would be different. I collapsed, nearly drove off the road 3 times in one week and decided that it was enough and went to the doctor. He sent me home, wrote me in as extreme burnout (completely true, I had to sleep at work for every coffee break to make it through the day and 30 mins before driving home to actually make it). So I thought Great, I will rest for a few months and go back to work after that! Nope. The state heath insurance office said Our specialists decided, that you are perfectly fine. No sick pay. Get back to operating the industrial concrete blender. The health center doctors signed a letter, but no, I was fucked. So on top of this I got extreme financial stress. We got out of this crap by renting our cabin and starting going full into an outdoor adventure business. What a great time. Where was this? In Sweden in January 2019.

The insurance system does not work in the medical field, it would never work because insurance is for managing risks that are unknown, like a house flooding or your car getting hit in an intersection.

In medical "insurance" it is often dealing with known issues, and the insurance system is just not set up to deal with preventative care, annual check ups, mammograms, blood tests, or pre-existing conditions. It would be like trying to use car insurance to pay for an oil change, which is just as ridiculous as it sounds in your head.

That's exactly why the term "insurance" should be used when discussing a single payer system, it's not really insurance, it should be a collective action group that works together with the medical community to find a middle ground where hospitals can still exist and pay wages to their staff, the people can get the medical care they need without getting thrown into poverty for daring to get sick, and the government benefits from having a healthier population as a whole.

Too bad theres way too much money in the short term in keeping this all private, and having a sicker population, so we have decades of insurance company propaganda to work against, and a huge population of people that don't understand that by doing single payer health care your taxes would go up, but you also wouldn't be paying out the nose for medical insurance & medical care (because they don't cover anything). Also think of a world where your health care isn't beholden to your employment, all the different choices you'd make in your life.

I have a chronic condition that requires expensive medication. Every. Single. Year. I have to fight insurance to renew the prescription. I went without for months the first time and ended up needing a far more expensive surgery to fix the damage it caused. I was already pretty left-leaning before my diagnosis, but now I don’t believe there is any justification for private anything in healthcare. It’s a completely morally bankrupt business to be making money off of people’s unavoidable suffering.

Bold to assume he bothered to feed it to a computer when you can just reject without having to do that. Feeding something to a computer takes time, and time is money y'know.

How is that even legal? How is someone who hasn’t examined the patient and isn’t their physician allowed to make treatment decisions? If they even have the necessary qualifications.

People love to shit on the VA, because they're the largest American healthcare provider in the country so there's a lot of bad stories

But my last MRI went like this:

Doctor: you need an MRI, let me check if it's open. (Less than a minute on laptop). Ok, go down to room ____ and they can get you in now.

There's a huge up front cost for that machine, so for profit hospitals went everyone to use it to make the money back, and insurance wants no one to use it so they don't have to pay.

Take insurance out of the picture, take the hospital trying to make money out of the picture. And it's really that easy. No one pushes for unnecessary tests, no one tries to prevent necessary tests. And there's a huge push towards preventive medicine, because it's cheaper to catch shit early.

We already pay more than what it would cost, it's just the healthcare industry donates to both parties, so as long as both standards are "at least they're not the other team" shits never going to get fixed.

If we hold higher standards than that, it won't take many election cycles to get change to actually happen

On the flip side, I can't imagine being the person arguing for the insurance companies makes them a better or happy person in the long term. Being a devil's henchman, over time it must destroy important parts of them like empathy, trust in people, and their basic human decency. Virtues that are needed now more than ever in society.

“You want me to whip out my dick and slap you with it since that was the stupidest question I’ve heard?”

You should see what @pancakes@sh.itjust.works wrote in this very thread. You basically just answered their question about what this industry must do to a person's ability to empathize and be a decent person to others. Or in this case, maybe lack thereof is a job requirement?

Question: how the fuck did any of this ever become legal?

I would guess lobbying.

You do need some checks and balances because what's to stop a hospital from profiting off the insurance companies by asking for a CT scan/whatever of every single patient just because they can.

I suppose we could have the government run the hospitals too. But noooooo, that's never going to work out because communism or something.

Maybe we should try effective altruism and accelerationism instead? Let's just hand over all our money to a few tech bros and then we can go beg them to pay for the scans. And if they don't pay for it, surely someone will come up with a cheaper technology to do the same. Yes, that'll definitely work.

I fucking wish. At least then I wouldn't have to be put on hold for 30 min just to have to eventually explain to a person who was hired 3 weeks ago how to do their job.

Private insurance always has you speak to an actual adjuster for authorization, mainly because they know any sort of automated system would be more accurate and faster than having you talk to their undertrained and understaffed employees.

Private insurance's goal is to erect as many barriers between the provider and the patients as possible, and then blame the provider for all the barriers. It works every time.

"I have the best insurance, they told me it would be covered". Nope, Medicare is the best insurance and you traded that away for a privatized Medicare supplemental that lies to you about your coverage.

Yes, I think that's exactly what my doctor was trying to describe. He said if they're at that point, they basically have to guess what information they're looking for other than "I'm a qualified physician that has run diagnostic tests and determined this is the best course of treatment. Here are those tests and why it indicates X and therefore requires Y."

I've had to do unnecessary labs to prove an ailment wasn't something else that some person hundreds or thousands of miles away thought it might be.

If you think you hate insurance companies, find an honest doctor and ask them what they think of the US Healthcare system and health insurance. I've never seen a doctor so worked up and angry than when discussing the current medical system.

Edit: this guy is fun to watch on this topic: https://youtu.be/s33AVskz3T8?si=Qqx2nAJjguMOxnNL

I file a complaint with the department of insurance instantly when they deny anything. I don't negotiate with them for 3 months first, I jump straight to sicking the Feds on them and my doctors have always provided me every bit of data I need and cheered me on.

And I've won every time. It annoys me that I have to do it, but I enjoy that it costs the insurance extra every time.