The Mysterious Patient in Room 23: The Hermit Baroness | Hacker News Reader

The Mysterious Patient in Room 23: The Hermit Baroness

nytimes.com

79 pointsdrdee38 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20221022193943/https://www.nytim...

A fascinating story - the poor woman was the child of war criminals from another century and became a shut-in. So much history, and bizarre.

Another excellent article about her aunt, referenced in the piece: https://archive.ph/l8roL

Obviously there's a lot of mental health issues at play here. But I can't help but be horrified. Someone with such an intense desire for privacy has their entire life and personal affairs laid bare in the New York Times. It sickens me. It feels like tabloid levels of exploitation.

Can someone from her era be a citizen via refugee status (due to her post-war germany and cuban history)? Not having an SSN is something that makes me wonder about her status and how she was able to subsist so long without being hassled about her immigration status.

"Being hassled about your immigration status" is very much a matter of somebody chosing to bring it to the attention of some competent authority who choses to take action. Choice is strong in this. Not that I like the authorities can and do choose who to hassle, but I believe it to be the reality.

TL;DR in a sanatorium with bills being met or in the right sanatorium as an indigent, there is no necessary role for immigration authorities, unless somebody "poked the bear"

Another way to look at it is to realize how rarely you need to prove who you are, let alone your legal residency.

If you have someone to live with, you can subsist for quite a long time before anyone notices, and even then, will they care?

Within the UK those accessing the NHS might be asked to prove elibility by dedicated teams.

If they can't prove it they will be billed 150% of the nominal NHS cost (still cheap in grand scheme of things).

No one has ever shown the process to be cost effective. Nor is it terrible efficient as the vast majority of healthcare professionals do not proactively engage with the process. (Likely as they feel underpaid to do their actual job and are unwilling to take on a police role).

More likely because the job of a doctor is to save lives and not to discourage patients from seeking help because they’ve become an informant for the immigration Gestapo

Who is paying the doctor if patient is not insured?

Unless doctor wants to work pro bono on his own time.

I think that we should really (1) stop thinking that immigration is a problem and (2) obsess about it and (3) make up ex-post rationalisations for idiotic anti-immigration policies.

The day after the A&E becomes a branch of the immigration Gestapo, illegal immigrants will stop seeking medical advice. Even some legal immigrants may be scared away. Apart from the obvious humanitarian concerns, guess what happens if these people catch a dangerous contagious disease.

Ah yes, let the citizens pay for illegal migrants healthcare while business owners capitalize on cheap workforce. Externalise expenses, internalise profits. Yay.

And yes, immigration is a problem once it becomes a way to fuck over local workforce.

Oh, well, and I don’t like paying for the local poor and for the work-shy. What do we do about it?

If we can let them die, then you are coherent. If we only let die the foreigner, you are being a xenophobe.

Controlling immigration, assuming it’s an issue, is the job of the border police, not of the doctor.

WTF is „work-shy“? Unemployed-and-happy-about it? Either you work, in education or pay up for your time off.

Not all „foreigners“ is illegal migrants.

Doctor should control insurance status. Regardless if it's local or illegal migrant. Locals abusing insurance by working under table and not paying insurance is same BS.

Work-shy: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/work-shy

I don’t know where you are from, but everywhere I lived I never had to be insured or to show my “insurance status” in order to receive medical care. In your country, what do they do with the homeless? They let them die?

Unless someone has plenty of inheritance or won a lottery... That's leeching.

In my corner of EU (and I believe in many other parts too), workforce (including actively looking for work), students and pensioners are automatically insured. If you want to receive state-paid services, you'll have to present your ID and staff will check your insurance status while checking you in and checking out medical history. If you're insured in another EU country, you'll have to present a proof of that.

Emergency care won't be refused for obvious reasons but you'll be billed. But non-emergency care will be refused if you got no coverage by public or private insurance. Paying out of pocket is an option in private sector and for some procedures in public hospitals.

There're plenty of organisations who work with homeless and try to convert them to good citizens. Helping to get paperwork, housing and education opportunities. Which gives health insurance as well.

However, hardcore homeless who have mental issues fall under long-term patients who would get insurance once their mental illness is confirmed.

But if you're unemployed, out of school and on your „sabbatical“ or whatever you call it.. Pay base rate for your insurance. State health insurance is 7% of a salary, thus base rate works out to €600/year based on current minimum wage.

I lost my SS card 20 years ago and it's never been needed for anything ever.

Losing your card is not the same thing as not having a number assigned to you.

There is a huge difference.

She is a caucasian woman living on Central Park, she’s not going to get hassled about her immigration status (which, according to the article, is LPR).

Basically nobody is hassled about their immigration status in the US these days, except when they either are caught crossing the border, or commit a serious crime which in latter case sometimes results in expulsion. But other than these two, pretty much no explicit hassling.

>>Guardianship, which provides essential protection to many frail or incapacitated people, has also been criticized as overly intrusive, and its legal processes as secretive. Claude Pepper, the former chairman of the House Select Committee on Aging, once called it “the most punitive civil penalty that can be levied against an American citizen, with the exception, of course, of the death penalty.”<<

This is true. Here is an article about it (The New Yorker, October 2, 2017):

How The Elderly Lose Their Rights

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderl...

There are many examples of abuse of the elderly, such as this case, "a 90-year-old woman almost lost her house for failing to pay $0.06, six cents, in property taxes, thus making a slogan of the Libertarian Party empirically true, “taxation is theft.”

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nj-homeowner-nearly-lo...

And cities taking away people's rights and their property are the main culprits, as in these cases:

Left With Nothing (The Washington Post, September 8, 2013) https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2013/09/08/l...

A Property Tax Money Machine Crushes Families (Bloomberg, December 20, 2021) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-12-20/minority-...

I wrote about it in a post titled, "When A House Is A Tragic Character" because I feel, like Claude Pepper did, that this theft is so punitive, abusive, and unethical, yet it keeps happening and nobody in government is doing anything to prevent it, and not enough people know that it could happen to them.

not to mention the film "I Care a Lot", with an admittedly outlandish plot but a disturbingly plausible dramatization of the legal aspects of guardianship

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9893250/

Thanks! Will add it to the queue!

The secret of yon-yon-ni-san.

My friend, then one I comment about here, now has a guardian. She'd incapacitated herself with alcohol in September 2019. Her father called me in October, 'do you know where she is'? I said she was back in a mental hospital. She was released to the street, so her father and I went to file a missing person report with the police. The police officer looked her up & said she wasn't missing because she'd been taken back to the mental hospital that morning. The case worker at the mental hospital told us that hundreds of petitions for involuntary treatment get dropped every month because they don't have the capacity to forcibly treat everyone they think needs to be forcibly treated. Because they now had context for the random crazy person who'd gotten dropped off by the cops, they had the ability to make sure my friend would not be released to the street again.

Her father spent $40,000 on a guardianship proceedings. She challenged the guardianship and was assigned a private guardian/fiduciary company as her guardian. They dropped her off at a care home in December 2019: "this is your life now."

Sometimes guardianship is fine. Sometimes it's abusive.

Sobriety helped my friend recover from her September/October 2019 drinking binge by February 2020, even though the drugs she was forcibly injected with are contraindicated for helping with substance abuse. My friend tried to make the best of her time at the care home: she got a phone job, was a counselor to other residents at that 'mental health' care home, talked to her attorney and public advocate about getting moved out of the care home. They just ignored her and collected their fees from her estate.

Eventually she gave up, arranged for a ride from a friend she'd met online, and jumped the care home's fence. She called me the next day, as she felt I was her best option for a place to stay. She did her own hostage negotiations with her one court-assigned attorneys. The guardian eventually found a care home where she could leave by herself during the day, which she thought was acceptable. This was basically a hospice home (worse than the mental health care home), but she had a little bit of freedom.

We separately filed with the court to ask for a replacement guardian. Her guardian filed a counter-petition for protective order, against me. The basis was "our ward escaped from our custody, and tcj_phx did not tell us where she was at." This was granted. The court dismissed my petition for a replacement guardian. The court ignored my friend's own petition for a replacement guardian.

The guardian took away her ability to leave the second care home on account of her use of drugs, shared by some friendly people at the local park. After 2 months of being locked up at the hospice home she called 911 for herself, was taken to a psych hospital, taken off all the psych drugs, then returned to the hospice home. Escaped, captured, escaped, captured. She doesn't do well on the run.

This past summer has been terrible for my friend. I ran out of money for motels, and I couldn't keep her off alcohol. I called the public fiduciary in August 2022. She said I could file a complaint with Adult Protective services [APS], but said it's very difficult to get APS to open a case. I filed online, got a call within a day and a half. The APS worker came out to visit us. She asked my friend, "are you safe?" She confirmed she was. They dispatched six police officers and a team to pick up my friend the following morning. When I called her phone that morning, a male voice said I was in violation of a court order, and would've been arrested if I'd been there. It's been almost 2 months, and I haven't been arrested yet, so I think I'm safe.

Now my friend has an advocate. She's been sent to a drug/alcohol rehab business, which is progress. But they've still got her on Abilify, which is FDA-approved to give people compulsive behavior. Sometimes doctors do good work, sometimes they're idiots. <sigh>.

I think this is all good material to motivate the Supreme Court to fix our make-work system of medicine and justice, but they don't want to deal with me. This week I get to send a petition for rehearing [0] to the Justices, which they're just going to ignore.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/supct/rule_44

I've asked for congressional oversight of the supreme court, but Congressman Gosar's response told me that justice is only available to those who can afford an attorney. Senator Sinema's staff responded to my meeting request by emailng a form letter about the WHO. Next I'm going to send her a paper letter asking her to clarify her response.

I went to Blake Masters' campaign stop (for U.S. Senate, vs. incumbent Senator Mark Kelly) and asked him about Medical Freedom, within the context of "vaccine mandates". He had a good grasp of how the Biden Administration tried to use OSHA to force "vaccines" on people who don't want to participate in the trials of this particular experimental drug.

Afterwards I told Mr. Masters the tragedy of Jared Loughner [1] was that Loughner was giving clear signs he was unhinged, but he couldn't be helped because it's "a very serious deprivation of liberty to be forced into treatment." Mr. Masters had an intenseness to listening: as if he hears the same crap at every campaign stop, but he hadn't heard about The Tragedy of Jared Loughner before.

[1] Jared Lee Loughner shot up Congresswoman Giffords' "Congress On Your Corner" event in January 2011. His parents tried to intervene in his deterioration, but didn't know what to do. Giffords is Senator Kelly's wife. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Laughner

I read this story about the hospital filing for guardianship of an incapacitated old woman and think, "that's reasonable". I consider my friend's predicament with guardianship and am infuriated.

I think everyone supports medical freedom, except for conservatives who've fallen for a version of "fake spirituality", and liberals who've been terrorized into thinking their survival depends on everyone getting dosed with pharmaceuticals.

Maybe I'll submit a poll.

edit: I resonate with this, at the conclusion of the submission: "“I’m still fighting for her,” Ms. Faerber said." (Faerber is "a housekeeper and caregiver from Guyana").

Wow her family was profoundly evil.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2020-04-21/ty-article-magazin...

> In March 1945, it said, just before the end of World War II, Margit held a large party in the town of Rechnitz on the Austrian-Hungarian border to fete her Nazi friends. She, the daughter and heiress of European baron and tycoon Heinrich Thyssen, and her friends drank and danced the night away.

> At the height of the evening, just for fun, 12 of the guests boarded trucks or walked to a nearby field, where 180 Jewish slave laborers who had been building fortifications were assembled. They had already been forced to dig a large pit, strip, and get down on their knees. The guests took turns shooting them to death before returning to the party. The organizer of this operation was Margit’s lover Hans Joachim Oldenberg. Margit’s husband, Count Ivan Batthyany, Sacha’s grandfather’s brother, was also at the party.

She's not a victim. She's making everyone in the area who can not afford care the victim. This woman who is worth millions and millions is not spotting her share.

What in the article makes you think she is worth millions and millions?

If you read the article, it’s pretty clear that she’s not likely to have access to millions and millions. Perhaps her family in Europe does, but as it says right in the subheading, they cut her off.

Ah yes the same person who barely could afford the cremation of her mother is worth millions and millions.

This woman's family has billions of dollars.

I don't see how that is relevant. If my brother has millions it's not my money. I can't spend it.

This is piece of shit website is demanding subscription or else I can't read the article. Fuck off.

Premises:

- Good journalism comes at a price.

- Good journalism is vital to a healthy democracy.

Conclusion:

Your entitled and inarticulate refusal to pay will cost you dearly.

It seems you’ve responded to a refusal to subscribe with an argument for willingness to pay. It is possible to be open to payment and not to subscription.

HN is filled with people bemoaning subscription software. Subscriptions, whether to software or news, shift power toward sellers and invite dark patterns for its abuse.

That abuse is well enough recognized to be the subject of an often celebrated (on HN) CA law attempting to make subscription less odious.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

Can’t speak for parent but I’d be slow to conflate unwillingness to subscribe and unwillingness to pay.

Idk, I can’t assume he is unwilling to subscribe just from his complaint. In any case, nytimes initial subscription costs like 5 bucks a month for a year. There are bigger things in the world for everyone to worry about. OTOH, If this is all about principle, he can read it at a local library, assuming he is in US. In any case, they come across as entitled more than anything

As I said: the message is rather inarticulate, so I wouldn't read too much into it.

But, although in general I dislike subscription models, they do make sense for newspapers. If they were to switch to "pay per article", it won't be long before the bean counters step in and turn the focus of the paper on social outrage and Kim Kardashian. It has the inherent danger of turning the NY Times into Buzzfeed.

And just in case someone is going to claim that Buzzfeed has serious news: the two are incomparable. Buzzfeed News' frontpage right now is literally Kanye, Kim, and Trump. Ukraine? Too far away. Sunak? Who's that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com