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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2975 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 8, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Re: United Health CEO, I feel that I'm among the extreme minority of the population that thinks it's bad to celebrate political assassinations and also that it is a social good for companies to offer insurance in the US. I am astounded by how relatively unprofitable being an insurance company is and also why anyone would go into this industry and put up with the abuse and general scorn.

Imagine being at a party and saying you work at a health insurance company. Total hatred from almost everyone.

It's amazing that people do this at all?

It is a very important job. Somebody has to tell doctors and patients no. That said, I sure wouldn’t want to do it.

I think it is hypothetically possible for a health insurance CEO to be so cartoonishly evil that murdering him on the street becomes ethically justified. I haven’t seen the evidence yet. I assume if it existed it would be plastered all over the internet.

I assume if it existed it would be plastered all over the internet.

Have you been looking at the same internet I have? I haven't done the rigorous fact-checking yet, but nurses and other health workers were ostensibly celebrating what happened. The stories I've seen were that his health company denied twice as many complaints as the industry average, had a kick-back arrangement of some kind with an epilepsy drug manufacturer which meant they forced doctors to hand out medicine that they knew wouldn't work before approving anything that would and that this ceo approved an AI/algorithm with a 91% error rate to deny claims.

Do you have a cite for the epilepsy thing? I'm not able to find anything.

AI/Algorithm ... deny claims

This sounds bad but the details are too short for me to judge with.

FWIW the case is still pending but UHC argues that it was not used for coverage decisions. The Stat News article which describes it in detail is paywalled, but here's Ars for a teaser

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate-forces-elderly-out-of-rehab-nursing-homes-suit-claims/

Reading this article makes it sound even worse than I thought when I first heard about it, and by the time I got to the end of it I supported the assassin more than I did at first.

I used to work on Wall Street and every time an article was written about something nefarious we were supposedly doing, it was so incredibly wrong and ill informed that it burned me out on investigative reporting. Doubly so if it's about an unpopular industry.

My knee jerk reaction in the situation, as someone who really doesn't understand the health care business, is to remain skeptical.

I'll probably have to wait six years for the court case to work itself out before I draw conclusions.

My redpill was all the stories about how white the tech industry is.

If your only tool is a hammer, everything is a nail...

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