Disputing charges, small claims court or simply never paying bills is the better option because the good faith channels are rigged.
This project is helpful and is going into the case management workflow right away. Fight slop with well crafted, guardrailed slop.
Out of curiosity, does ACA require coverage if the doctor refuses?
ACA coverage is for the procedure, doctors who won’t refuse can be found at https://childfreefriendlydoctors.com/
If you want kids, Godspeed. If you don’t, I am building systems to radically empower that outcome. “Build something people want.” or something like that. Essentially a suffering reduction flywheel.
how many are unwanted though? unintended doesn't necessarily have the negative connotation that /r/childfree folks make it out to be.
That said, I do take umbrage with people using suspicious statistics in unusual ways to push an agenda. If your cause is just, there is no need to use misleading statistics to inflate its importance. I argue this for causes I support as well as those I don't support.
> If your cause is just, there is no need to use misleading statistics to inflate its importance.
I absolutely love this, and appreciate you calling it out. We need more of this.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
> 64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.
Unfortunately, the dataset for unintended pregnancies doesn’t also ask if it was unwanted, leaving us to infer preferences via various datasets.
I suspect there’s often an anti-natal bias at work: unwanted children have a very low negative value (like toxic waste), while wanted children are a luxury good.
You mentioned a cost-benefit ratio. How does this calculate the pain of not being able to have more desired children?
People who want kids are not my TAM, I cannot speak to their unmet desires. We all must grieve that which we want but cannot have. Life is inherently unfair. I can speak to the burden of unwanted children though.
I am sorry to hear of your struggle and wish you well.
> She began helping friends file appeals, too, then asked herself a question that’s typical for engineers: Could she figure out a way to automate the process?
> After a year of tinkering, she just launched her answer: Fight Health Insurance[0], an open-source platform that takes advantage of large language models to help users generate health insurance appeals with AI.
Next thing you know the entire system is just a bunch of large language models shooting email at one another and it becomes even more unwieldy and irritating to engage with.
What will happen to insurance companies (and policies) once they can no longer rely on flippant violations to pad their profits depends on other factors.
And I mean, it could be, the history has yet to be written for AI in terms of it's long-term effects on industries, but I think as I said it's very generous on your part to preemptively assume that it will benefit the customers.
Just this morning I was thinking how every single streaming service pushed out a version with ads and a more expensive ad-free version recently. It just comes to ~$20/mo to upgrade them all, but how much more can they pile on before people just have nothing left?
The end result is that there is less slack in the economic system. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for individuals to leverage inefficiencies. It means there is less room to be human. Less room to make mistakes.
It is just the latest way of transferring wealth from the many to the few.
It's like Gaben said, piracy is a service problem, not entirely a cost problem. The same 20 euro subscription would've gotten be 100x more movies and shows a few years ago, whereas now it's split to a million random services. Sometimes one season of a show is on 1 service, while the next one is on a different one. You also can't get 4K anywhere, every service has shit quality.
So why bother paying, when radarr lets me get 4k content of anything I'd ever want to watch, completely for free?
I would like to see some data actually about each streaming service content availability in a chart by country with over time changes.
What I DO mind is how shitty it all is. I don't want to search through 8 apps just to find what I want. I don't want to open something called Super Freebie Movie to watch season one and then go to Amazon Prime Video for season two. I don't want to have some that inexplicably only play at low quality and there's no settings to turn the quality up.
I mean, the apps suck ass. We need a common interface for this, like we had with TV. If we're gonna be breaking up the content into a million different places I should damn well be able to see it all with 1 interface, 1 website, that's fast, reliable, and easy to use.
They already do, and it's pretty obvious.
It's clear the people adopting the AI systems are the big co's -- we've been battling half-assed phone navigation agents for a decade now, and more recently chatbots (often with humorous results -- see the "No Backsies" car dealership chatbot). AI always favors the one with more resources.
When you have AI's battling AI's, rather than making progress, I suspect it'll actually result in confusion, more delays as tighter roadblocks pop up, and probably some humorous events like the infamous Dominos-vs-Papa-Johns prank call https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALnPVybD9X8 but darker because it'll be about cancer treatments instead of pizza prices.
The only winners will be data center operators, and the losers will be everyone without access to the AI tools. In an arms race, everyone loses in the long view.
In other words "suspicious bot activity detected, start over" and "account suspended for security reasons" will become new crappy barriers to claims and appeals.
I've always wondered why don't we have companies that "equalize" that fight, with some kind of subscription or other revenue model that aligns with the consumer. They could also have armies of lawyers fighting on the side of the claimer.
There are other hidden costs, too, like government employees who have to deal with private insurance issues for purposes of sorting out benefits and child support and all kinds of things, but aren’t primarily involved with healthcare so I’m sure those hours aren’t counted among costs of our healthcare system. Not sure about the hours (and hours, and hours) HR at entities public and private lose to dicking around with insurers and brokers and HSA providers and such. Doubt that’s counted, but it’s real and significant. Healthcare providers waste lots of money on similar things from their side, but I expect those figures make it in to even fairly naïve system cost estimates.
Prices is a purposeful word choice. I don’t mean costs, or your costs. I mean agnostic to who is paying - whether it’s a compulsory non tax payment via insurance and hence the price the insurer sees, or the price you pay for insurance, or the price that CMS pays for an appointment, whatever.
Yes to the first two, but the latter is a good way to get your credit score destroyed for a few years, and plenty of insurance companies are willing to send unpaid bills to collections agencies which are very aggressive about collecting.
Not necessarily or at all - in California there are a bunch of laws about what healthcare debt can even be reported on your credit score. I routinely let things fall into collections and maintain a very high credit score because I ironically gain more negotiation power occasionally with the debt collector than whatever service I was charged for - often this happens as a result of over-billing. Dispute it enough times and they can just disappear. The credit hit is/should be minor. They use "credit" as an intimidation tool to coerce people into paying bills they don't actually owe.
Classic example - I get a procedure. Doctor submits a claim that is pre-authorized (I don't know the exact term). You receive procedure, insurer later denies claim. The doctor then passes the bill to you. Later, the doctor and insurer may come to an agreement, and the doctor is paid - but sometimes/often this is never communicated back to the patient, effectively "double billing." In these cases the only sane way to navigate it is by simply allowing it to fall to collections.
The morally correct choice is to just not pay.
Personally, I just don't trust companies to not put that sort of thing in a credit report. Do we actually audit for that sort of thing? And what if they do? Assuming anyone finds out, they get to drag the punishment out over the span of years, and if they do get punished, it's probably only a fraction of the money that they earned by reducing risk.
[1]https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-propo...
Debt holders can (and will) sue to collect, win, and take the money by court order. Depending on the state they will take the debt, then take the amount it cost to collect the debt.
Do people live in some kind of alternate reality USA where poor people who can't pay extortionate medical bills don't have their checking and savings accounts wiped out by private equity firms pretending to be healthcare providers?
In my state over the past ten years 14,000 civil suits have been filed to collect medical debt. Up until last year it was legal for debt holders to place liens on debtor's houses, often their only remaining asset after being wiped out by an illness. It was only made illegal after a particularly aggressive private equity-backed firm cosplaying as a healthcare provider started relentlessly pursuing their debts, putting liens on elderly people's homes, and then aggressively pursuing judgements on the liens, and-- get this-- SNIPING THE HOME DURING THE LIEN SALES.
A person cancer would not show up to court due to being a person with cancer, the private equity firm pretending to be a healthcare provider would get a default judgement, and then immediately start hammering on the courts to get dispositions and final judgements in order to add the person with cancer's house to their real estate portfolio.
The state legislature made it illegal to garnish the wages of someone living below the poverty level at the same time because medical debt collectors were specifically targeting patients who could barely pay their mortgage due to not working due to being sick by garnishing what wages they were able to earn, if any, to the point that the debtor went into foreclosure (in order to facilitate the confiscation of their home).
Please try, for just a few hundred milliseconds, to imagine losing your paid-off (or almost paid off) house, a scant few years before retirement age, because you got cancer.
Your choice, but don't act like you have some kind of moral high ground here.
I remember Google denying coverage after a surgical procedure that they approved during the prior authorization period, and then running out the clock on my appeal. That's on them, no evil insurance company to blame, just my employer. And, the market decided... I don't work there anymore.