Oh God have we reached a point in this dystopia where scammers are buying medical debt or patient claims to hunt among the wounded and desperate!?
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The number on the statement/bill was to the lab, the statement was from Blue Cross.
My wife has more patience than me so tommorow she’s going to figure it out.
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If your state has a “State Board of Insurance” (you may need to contact your state representative or other state congress-critter or your state’s AG office if you have a hard time finding contact info for such an entity), you could report this bad-faith processing (or more-like LACK thereof) by your insurer to your duly constituted authorities. Submit all the paperwork, receipts, names and or ID or badge numbers of insurance people you talked with, the dates you communicated, the whole enchilada.
All of it. Inundate them in evidence.
I got some very rough treatment while 8 months pregnant, with some really crappy insurance, and first I explained to the insurer what I was going to do, and then I did it, I reported them to the state board (of the state I was living in). Amazingly, I got coverage for fees/bills that were supposed to be covered in less than a week.
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Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids
Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found.
So the same people who make money out of stopping Americans from getting the prescriptons they need, was also just bribed to bypass any sort of safety checks when that was the more profitable course of action.
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We’ve been eligible for a subsidy since the ACA started, but I totally screwed up our personal taxes and business taxes which meant I was denied a subsidy for the upcoming year.
That’s a huge problem that’s been causing a lot of anxiety.
I got an accountant to straighten things out and get the proper forms to reconcile everything.
I started the appeals process last week.
Today I got a phone call from the Marketplace by a very nice woman who was very empathetic and kind.
She said she looked at my appeal and due to my health and drug needs it’s been expedited and should get resolved so we’ll still get the subsidy.
She said she reached out to be sure I knew what was going on and what the process is going forward.
It was the most reassuring conversation I’ve ever had with anyone about health care. She was so kind.
Point is, the ACA is a lifesaver and I can not believe they are talking about screwing with it.
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They are not talking about “screwing with it”, they are talking about taking it out to an alley and shooting it in the back of the head.
They are doing this because it is a lifesaver: primarily the lives of poor people, who it is more profitable to drain of everything they and their family and (after a couple of rounds of GoFundMes) their friends have, then allow to die when there’s nothing more to be squeezed.
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Seems to me a couple thousand people can definitely be taken down by billions of people. If we work together.
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The last time we got an influx of professionals was Vietnam Draft Dodgers, about 32,000 people. The driver for the last wave of 113,000 refugees from the 
has been mostly economic and social.
America’s Public Health Breakdown Is Just Getting Started
Why Canada should prepare for an influx of scientists, educators and more.
The Tyee, Dec 19 2024
The impending return of Donald Trump to the White House seems likely to collapse American health science, with consequences as disastrous for the rest of the world as for the approximately 340 million Americans in the U.S. Canada may be able to soften the impact here, but it will not be easy.
They link to an interesting study in The Lancet:
Nearly two decades ago, the Eight Americas study offered a novel lens for examining health inequities in the USA by partitioning the US population into eight groups based on geography, race, urbanicity, income per capita, and homicide rate. That study found gaps of 12·8 years for females and 15·4 years for males in life expectancy in 2001 across these eight groups. In this study, we aimed to update and expand the original Eight Americas study, examining trends in life expectancy from 2000 to 2021 for ten Americas (analogues to the original eight, plus two additional groups comprising the US Latino population), by year, sex, and age group.
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https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/
Nurses are finding that their jobs are being enshittified by the combination of gig work, app vendors and private healthcare providers.
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Thompson’s assassination has brought renewed attention to the practices of the health industry and especially UnitedHealth Group, which reported $22 billion in profits last year. For more, we speak with Kevin Dwyer, who has firsthand experience with UnitedHealthcare denying him lifesaving medication for cystic fibrosis. “The thought of getting this medication that could stop my decline was everything to me. And it was devastating when I got the denial,” says Dwyer, who only got approved after his case became a national news story. “It shouldn’t take this, but unfortunately it does,” says Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York and co-founder of the Health Care for All New York campaign.
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United Healthcare just denied a claim on one of my patients in the ICU with:
– a brain hemorrhage
– in a coma
– on a ventilator
– in heart failure…because I haven’t proven to them that caring for her in the hospital was “medically necessary”.
Tear it all down.
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Bernie’s Op-ed today…
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“We’re the state with the number one rate of obesity, and I’ve just lost all access to my most powerful tool for treating obesity medically with almost every one of my payers,” she said. “How does that make sense?”
Proponents say long-term savings could outweigh the cost — especially in West Virginia, which has the nation’s highest rates of obesity and diabetes. Obesity increases their risk for conditions such as heart disease, cancer and high blood pressure. About half of West Virginians rely on Medicare or Medicaid for insurance.
Not a shock for WV to be so damned shortsighted, but frustrating as all hell.
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Interesting to think about whether that comic would have been made and published without the efforts of Luigi.
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Ah yes, that name… that… name… courtesy of Meta AI chatbot and an approach to current affairs, we see this “exchange”:
source:
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Is Katie making a tutorial on how to get Meta to provide all of your data to the FBI?
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targeted strike
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