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throwaway539

49 karma · joined November 21, 2018

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throwaway539··on Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
Disclaimer: Throw-away account.

I worked for a company that mediates between Employers and Insurance companies.

In my country we have a system where disabled employees are partially paid for by either the insurance (from employer) or the goverment. 0-35% disabled -> No money is paid by insurance or government 36-80% disabled -> The insurance company pays part of the wage of the employee 81-100% disabled -> The government pays part of the wage, or completely pays the person not having to work

With "part of the wage" I mean that the employee would work part-time but would receive extra money to fill in the gap, so they could use the remaining time to recover, or just try and live life.

The way it worked is that the company would receive bonuses from both the insurance companies and employers if we could get people in either the 0-35 or 81-100 range.

This means we (they) would use any trick in the book to get people, clearly disabled, to no longer be marked as "Disabled enough".

This resulted in sending people that were disabled or recovering from disabilities to insurance-company-hired examiners, and sometimes even use court to enforce new medical checks over and over until they were marked as sub-35%. They would hire investigators to try get "proof" these people are not "that disabled at all"

In short, these were people, 36-50% disabled such as people in wheelchairs, hurt spines, burn-outs, and whatever else you can think of, to be forced into working full-time because they wouldn't be able to make enough money to support their own lives.

The moment where it really hit me, is when in a presentation, the CEO proudly stated "This year, we were able to get X (thousands) of people into the 0-35% range, this means we made our goals, so as a suprise we're all (200+ employees) going skiing together for a week!" (fully paid international vacation)

I did join the vacation at first, but on those mountains I realized that the people that would never be able to ski, paid for this. I swore I would never work for a company like this again, and I made a huge turn-around and went into the Healthcare sector.