Uber pays millions resolving DOJ lawsuit for overcharging disabled people
justice.gov
justice.gov
> Therefore the court ordered that the Commission to propose a comprehensive plan that provides meaningful access to taxi services for passengers using wheelchairs. The plan must include targeted goals and standards as well as anticipated measurable results. Furthermore, until such a plan was proposed and approved by the court, all new taxi medallions sold or new street hail livery licenses or permits issued by the Commission must be for wheelchair accessible vehicles.
Some additional information - https://drhandicap.com/insights/can-taxis-refuse-service-bas...
While this is more expensive for the taxi company to have ADA vehicles, that cost is spread out across the entirety of the customer base.
The difficulty comes with ride share that aren't licensed and displace taxi services resulting in difficulty spreading out the cost across all taxi rides... and that the ride share drivers (and companies) don't provide sufficient coverage is compared to the requirement for licensed taxis.
Wouldnt it make sense for Uber to subsidize the ADA compliant drivers for their extra costs (or reduced yield) and then for Uber to spread that cost across their entire service?
With Uber offering poor service for wheelchairs and similar, individuals needing those services remain using traditional taxis. Meanwhile, the regular riders (the bulk of the profits for a company) switch to Uber for whatever reason. This results in that the additional costs for handling riders that need the extra assistance are not borne by the unlicensed companies that are not providing the ADA services that the licensed companies are required to.
If one was to go with a "{A} should subsidize {B} for ADA rides" this would be "Uber should subsidize taxi companies" for the increased proportion of wheelchair accessible vans and similar that the taxi companies are required to maintain.
As it is, Uber isn't spreading any of the cost of ADA rides amongst their customers or drivers because (A) Uber doesn't have a sufficient set of vehicles available to address ADA and (B) Uber drivers are discriminating and not picking up passengers that have needs covered under the ADA.
American Medical Resource Institute guidance on discharges - https://www.aclsonline.us/blog/what-to-do-when-theres-no-one...
> You did your part and got your patient through surgery with flying colors. But, uh-oh, the ride your patient was expecting to get home is a no-show. What should your ASC do?
> Well, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, your ASC has a legal obligation to only discharge patients to a responsible adult when they have been under the influence of sedation.
> Unfortunately, now that Uber and Lyft are such convenient options for transportation, many patients think they can simply hop in a rideshare vehicle and that’s the same thing as being discharged to a caring family member or friend.
> However, the law in many states is still unclear on whether a rideshare driver counts as a “responsible adult” who is actually taking responsibility for the patient’s care just by stepping into the vehicle. In fact, in a recent Outpatient Surgery Magazine poll, 69 percent of surgical facilities said they never discharge an unaccompanied patient to take an Uber, Lyft or taxi home.
This has been an issue for me in the past when I was sedated for a root canal. I had my brother's girlfriend's father pick me up from the dentist.
As to walking out? I was in absolutely no shape to walk out.
If someone is still insistent on leaving:
> If you discover that your patient doesn’t have a responsible adult to take them home until after the procedure is complete and they’re dressed and insisting to go home on their own, your best option is to document as much as possible. Insist that the patient sign an AMA (against medical advice) form. Then write up the details of the patient’s non-compliance in an incident report in their medical record. Also, let their surgeon know.
The effect of the above is: "They're not allowed to forcibly eject you if doing so would make you unsafe"
For example, I was allowed to stay an extra night because I live alone and needed to coordinate a helper to safely go up my stairs.
There's a very specific set of reasons why they can hold you defined separately from this.
tl;dr if they do eject you into an unsafe envious they face liability, but not so much liability that they need to imprison you...
The title is "Discharge After Sedation or Anesthesia on the Day of the Procedure: Patient Transportation With or Without a Responsible Adult" from the American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology
The checklist starts out with:
> Review and comply with federal, state, and local law and regulations as well as facility accreditation requirements
> Engage the facility’s legal counsel, risk manager and/or similar role to review and address liability and legal concerns.
There are significant liability risks for a hospital to discharge a person who has been sedated to anyone other than an adult who has the obligation to give care to the person if needed.
This includes things like discharging a person who has been sedated to a ride share who then robs them (you are free to imagine worse situations). As this has happened with intoxicated people being driven home from a bar, hospitals are rightly concerned that if they discharge someone to a ride share, they may be incurring significant liability of their own.
Going back to my sedation dentistry experiences, the person who is going to take me home has to be there with me at the start while I am not yet sedated and there were a number of forms that I filled out when I became a patient of theirs identifying the people who could drive me.
The laws around the requirements and liability for a medical facility to discharge person who has been sedated do not give much wiggle room for the hospital to get out of that liability.
Uber lies about the availability of all vehicles, I think! I live in a town where there are no Uber drivers, but if you open up the app it will show 3 available with times and prices and even let you book one! Of course it doesn't exist and they will never show up. I am not sure why they do this other then to look like they have coverage to shareholders or something.
I know there are drivers who basically sit at home and check the current rates and when it's "worth it" to them they walk out and jump in the car and do a few rides.
That wouldn't happen if people were looking in the app seeing no drivers and not putting in that they needed a ride.
A post a while ago on reddit was someone who was complaining about a doordasher who didn't want to wait and bring like multiple bags of cat litter like up 3 flights of stairs. The amount of inconsiderate abuse people have towards them (making them wait, navigate buildings) is a poor allocation of resources.
Computers are resources. Iron ore is a resource. People aren't resources. They're people. The problem is the tech industry trying to treat people like resources.
If the delivery people are paid fairly by the delivery companies, then they will be more willing to do a good and thorough job, which includes navigating buildings.
I've been an Uber driver, and yeah, some people are awful.
But I'm also tired of getting calls from Favor delivery people telling me I have to meet them in a parking lot three miles away to collect my groceries because they're running late going to the club, and this is only a "side hustle" they do on Friday nights. If I'm paying a delivery fee, plus a tip, I expect them to complete their jobs.
Isn't that true for most types of jobs? There's a role called "Human Resources" in most medium and large sized companies. Are factory jobs leaning in to embrace the humanity of workers and not thinking of them and calling them resources? Would we find things substantially better in most fast food restaurants? Gig companies are at least letting people decide when they want to work and when they want to do something else with a degree of flexibility that seems unmatched everywhere outside of the gig economy.
A title change which reflects the shift in business from treating people like people and turning them into "resources."
The role used to be called "Personnel," back when people were expected to be treated as persons.
Was that before the 8 hour work day became standard? Was that before businesses were forced to stop exploiting child labor? It seems like a lot of progress has been made where things are much more humane now than they were historically. I think a more compelling argument here is that a large number of employers throughout history have been thinking of employees as cogs in a machine. I don't know that there was ever some worker utopia where they were treated like real people en masse.
But the gig employee is the business. They're the ones that are actually rendering the delivery service. The cost naturally falls onto them, because it takes them longer to fulfill this order.
Rather, the gig employee (note that word even you used, “employee”?) is a thinly veiled fiction the actual business uses to offload risks and avoid having to pay benefits.
If the gig employee was a real business they could set prices, choose how to go about doing the job (routes to take to destination, etc), market themselves instead of acting as an interchangeable cog in the real businesses’ app, etc, etc, etc, etc
Guy brought a watch in. I was getting ready to change it when he informed me that it was a $25,000 watch. I probably handed it back to him and said sorry, not taking responsibility for that. I was not qualified.
I can’t imagine forcing untrained people to deal with significant medical issues and be financially responsible for a fall etc.
I’ve had some severe disabilities at times, so I’ve been on both ends.
This sounds like simple miscommunication what the provided service actually is. When I order a package off Amazon, it gets delivered to my doorstep. When I ordered a fridge from an online retailer, it got delivered to the exact room where I wanted it, and the delivery people helped me lift it out of the styrofoam packaging. Superficially both are package deliveries, even from the same delivery company, but they are conducted and paid very differently. But which of these two can/should I expect if I order cat food from doordash?
That's literally the "work" part of the delivery job and the reason people pay for the service and tip. As someone who held many many different delivery jobs before smart phones and turn by turn GPS, you used to also have to figure out how to "navigate streets" to actually get to the person's house too. That was actually the thinking part of the job, the rest of it was just mechanical. The idea that an expectancy to have delivery people "navigate buildings" is "inconsiderate abuse" is pretty absurd. It's equally amusing to consider the act of waiting somehow being abusive as it's a reciprocal component of any delivery experience.
I would say that many of those who are unable to get to the store to buy cat litter are also unable to walk up three flights of stairs to pick it up.
Recently, I was recovering from surgery and was not allowed to get out of bed. The exception I made was to slowly crawl to the front door to pick up the food the dasher had left there. Often, even though the setting was set to "deliver to me", they would leave the food downstairs.
My only option then was to leave the food there to rot and hope someone steals it. This was particularly frustrating during the lockdown when restaurants would close early. By the time the bad delivery happened all restaurants in my area were closed.
Often, I was left without any options. I did cook food beforehand but sometimes even thawing food can be too much while you are recovering.
Getting the entire order reimbursed would mean that the delivery person won't get paid for the delivery at all. I did feel bad about it at first, but they could have kept their promise and brought it to me.
One option would be to allow Dashers to filter between "leave on front door" and "deliver to client". But no, I don't believe that I should feel bad for someone who lied about being able to fulfil the company's promise. Especially once it became a pattern.
I ended up ordering a lot of pizzas during that time, even if I don't particularly enjoy them. Old-school pizza delivery persons would not only deliver to my apartment's door but some would even offer to bring trash or recyclables downstairs for me.
I have not gotten a direct store driver in over 2 years.
For customers who aren't disabled, should they be able to make drivers wait around for a long time or should they pay? If they should pay, how else would they give exemptions to disabled people? If they shouldn't pay, then why would drivers sit around not making money? It seems like it's fair to compensate those drivers for their time (most jobs work like that) and if people don't have a good reason for that, they should be paying for the time they're making that driver wait.
Reasonable accommodations.
Villages in my country are losing their only stores because the stores don't get enough business to make it worth the cost. These are usually villages with a high average age. What happens to the residents? Many of the elderly don't have a car. They can't exactly go over to the next town and buy a week's worth of groceries if they can't carry these.
The store closing essentially kills off the village over time. Heavy additional costs to doing business can mean that a community just goes without any service at all. It might not be a common issue now, but if it ever does appear then it's not like you can turn the economy back on like you would flip a switch.
Also, there is no ADA compliance inspector. One of their customers would have to sue or report them. If they get reported then the remediation is to come up with a plan to address the concerns in a reasonable time. You really only get in trouble when you start willfully refusing to address issues. Again, businesses have had decades to address these. If they close and kill a town now, it’s because they didn’t do the right thing when times were good for them.
my mom renovated a hotel. she kicked up such a fuss about having to put in an expensive elevator. a couple years later, I became a wheelchair user. without the elevator, I couldn't stay with her. she hasn't complained about the elevator requirement since, for some reason.
You're confusing equity and equality.
Charging the same per minute/mile is equality. Charging the same per ride is equity.
To me paying same for the same resources is fair and impartial. Paying less is unfair and exploitative. Exploitative and being partial toward the possibly rich party that is the service buyer.
Because we are all citizens and all human beings, even the one with disabilities.
This is something that we, as a nation and a society, decided years ago, and we shouldn't throw out our ideals because they're inconvenient for tech companies.
Trying to get every business to charge all customers equally, even when some customers are far more costly to serve is a bad model. Better to just let the business charge whatever the real cost of providing the service is, and directly subsidize the disabled person to cover that increased cost.
/Unpopular opinion
In France you get both.
A fixed sum for your handicap+a bit more money if you have rent to pay, which amount to +/- minimum wage(which is very livable in most cities besides Paris) And you get free cabs/transportation, my neighbor's kid get a cab every day of the week without having to pay a cent, same for a lot of kids in special ed, cancer patients, any serious disease even temporary mean you can get free cabs.
And this is why the US tax code is a mile long with loopholes upon loopholes. It seems far more inefficient to me to get companies to play creative accounting than to give individuals some sum of money.
I really have come to believe that computer science and EE programs should include two mandatory semesters in ethics. So many of the companies in the space are laughably, comic-book-villian-level bad. People defend them because they also pay super well.
"Millions" are just a minor inconvenience for either company. They'll factor it into their cost of doing business and get the next round of investors to fund it. Sadly, this kind of thing is going to go on for a while.
Same with extremely scammy health insurance companies like United Healthcare.
I legitimately do not understand why they are allowed to exist with blatant criminal behavior.
Even after Travis they continue to be an Uber disgusting company.
https://www.wired.com/story/uber-self-driving-car-fatal-cras...
Modern times call for modern idioms: "threw them in front of the Uber".
> When Vasquez was looking at that phone for several seconds at a time, the defense writes, she was monitoring the company Slack, “doing her job.” Her personal phone, on the other hand, was significantly farther away, on the passenger seat. This differs from what Vasquez told the NTSB, but her attorneys argue the video is clear, and exculpatory: After the crash, the dashcam shows her reaching over to the passenger side to grab her personal phone and call 911.