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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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There was a wild post on r/RealEstate yesterday. It's already been deleted.

Hello,

I'm a young owner of a few rentals - I got lucky young starting a marketing business that worked.

We've been having some wind here lately and it partly ripped off some siding on the side of my house that's way to high for me to reach with a ladder. I look online and call a dude with good reviews - I think he's a solo gig. He pulls up within an hour of calling him and he's like "Oh, no big deal!". I watch him get out his ladder, get up there, screw these screws into the siding that are literally going into nothing (i think he did it so it looked like he was doing something), he pushed the siding back into the trim, and got down. Literally up there for 2 minutes. He said "Okay I'll go to my truck and get a quote"

He ends up coming back to my door like a half hour later and he claims his service call is $3000 and the screws were $5.

I kind of just look at him and I'm like "hahaha how much do I owe ya?"

Him: "$3005. I accept all forms of payment"

Me: "You're joking right? You told me on the phone your service call was $75."

Him: "We never talked sir. You must have talked to some other siding guy"

Me: "If I talked to someone else, how would you have known to come over right away and do my siding?"

Him: "Uhhh.. I mean.. Like I use a contracting app that gave me this job. My rate is $3000"

Me: "I'll give you $100 just to leave. I'm not doing this, that's crazy"

Him: "Maybe I should call the police. Should we do that?"

Me: "Go right ahead but it's a civil manner"

Him: "This is theft of services. If you don't pay, I'm pressing charges and you're going to jail"

Me: "I can promise you if you keep up this immoral scam like behavior you're going to end up in jail"

Him: "I just got out of prison, no sweat off my brow"

Me: "Doesn't surprise me with that prison tat on your neck"

Him: "Look kid you gonna pay me or not"

Me: "No"

Him: "You'll be hearing from my lawyer kid. Hope mommy and daddy can pay for it"

Me: See ya later!

I'm 25 but look 20. I've had people try to charge me crazy prices for things or take advantage of me but this was nuts and criminal (not literally but you know what i mean - just not right). Why are there people out there like this?

There's obviously a good chance that it's a totally fake story. I'd basically assume that it is. I don't even really care if there's even a 0.1% chance that it's actually true; it doesn't really matter.

Part of the reason why people likely believe that it's fake is that it sounds like absolutely outrageous behavior by the contractor. Something that no one would put up with. Something that would shock the conscience if it actually happened and there was a recording of the interaction or something.

So what's weird is that this is the standard modus operandi in the medical industry. It's just the way things are done. Yes, if you have insurance, then instead of telling you to your face that they're charging a ridiculous made up number after the fact, they tell your insurance provider the same thing. But the basic fact pattern is absolutely the same.

I'm definitely not going to go all Kulak and say that since this routinized obscenity shocks the conscious, everyone needs to start going around murderin'. But it absolutely is a routinized obscenity that should shock the conscience. Perhaps my crazy pills are significantly less potent than his, but they appear to still be crazy pills.

Lawyers can debate the legalese of "consent to treat" forms and what they do and do not allow, but it simply cannot be plausible that we will have a functional medical industry when it is the one and only industry that is allowed to simply refuse to provide you a price prior to authorizing work and then go on to just make up whatever the hell inflated price they want after the fact.

Medicine is worse than that. There was some bureaucratic confusion about whether insurance would be available for my kid's routine visit. I asked at the front desk what it would cost, assuming a normal visit with no complications, in case I couldn't apply insurance. She didn't know. I asked her who would. Didn't know that either. Tried calling the billing department, no answer. Looked up the billing information the hospital is required to publish by state law. The 'common' bills they showed did not include checkups. So basically, I could wait months for a different appointment or I could tell them I was willing to pay whatever price they asked after the fact. It worked out.

Vets, dentists, and the Surgery Center of Oklahoma can all quote prices. Medicine could too. I always thought the rightwing's Obamacare should've been: hospitals have to have transparent pricing and insurance companies can only say to the customer, "We'll cough up X money for your procedure based on your prognosis. We'll incentivize you to spend less than X. You can pay more than X if you make up the difference. You are allowed to spend that money at any hospital." The government can maintain a crappy website that lets you do price compare, with the assumption that Amazon or Walmart would make the actual working website.

A big problem with medicine, along with other notoriously expensive professional services like law, is that knowing which specific actions to take is part of the service. One can't provide a remotely accurate quote without having already performed the services requested. A checkup for a 10-year-old boy with no medical conditions is a very different service from a checkup for a 58-year-old woman with twelve medications and diabetes.

Do those differences show up with different billing codes when you send them over to insurance? If so, how is that difference expressed in the content of the billing codes?

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