Comment by braabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by braabe | Hacker News Reader

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I have had this experience, but not with healthcare insurers (in Germany). I cannot remember the last time I had to contact them - the last two times they contacted me, was to explain to me, that they have expanded their preventive care offerings and they recommend I go and get them.

Blanket rejections are an extremly efficient measure from the perspective of an entity when the consumer has nowhere else to go and you don't care about ethics. Just tell them no and many people will just give up. If they appeal, you can invest the work to fob them off properly or just pay and not deal with the hassle. I can barely tell the difference with the many public healthcare insurers in germany - if my insurer were to try this nonsense, I would be gone the next month. Universities, some agencies and especially the god-damned GEZ on the other hand...

What frustrates me more, is that it often turns into a class indicator: Do you know how to word your letters or to handle yourself in a way that indicates, that it will be more annoying to not-deal-with-you than to deal-with-you? And if you don't: Do you have a access (network/money) to someone who does?

> is that it often turns into a class indicator

Oh, man. One could rant for hours about this. You are absolutely right. But in the end it's not really a class indicator because info about this particular and similar schemes could theoretically be packed into a weekend long workshop. In any small company or big factory, and definitely in schools as early as grade 10.

But it's a matter of character and you have to be damn lucky if you get a teacher who cares that much. Even neighbors will more often than not, NOT enlighten "the less fortunate" about stuff like this. It's pathetic.

But that's why this cascade works so well to keep almost all of the "more fortunate" under perfect societal control by which I don't mean some mythological conspiracy but "Steuerungsmechanismen" (some dude who got out of some cult beautifully explained this but I forgot both his name and the title of the book), keeping almost all of them in line, mostly silent, and alienated from the inter-generational usefulness of critical thinking.

And there is no irony in all this. Too many peoples mindsets never left the modern dark ages. One can only raise a brow and chuckle at all this.

It's a class indicator for sure, but, in my opinion, not class in the sense of hierarchies but of intellectual style, niveau. These tactics are low, like punching drugs.

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