Abandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023

When my wife signed us up for health care through the state she was off by one day on my birthday. For the last year my life has been an absolute nightmare of people saying they fixed it but (surprise!) they didn't, getting insurance reimbursements & referrals bounced bc of the wrong date, having to spend hours on the phone trying to get it corrected so I'm not billed full amt at every single provider (surprise! It's never fixed!)

US health care makes Kafka's bureaucracies look simple & easy

Show threadAbandoned America
I'm arguably in control of my intellectual faculties but I still am at my wits end with it. I cannot imagine this level of overall inability to fix something as simple as a date off by one day, baked into a byzantine network of garbage medical records/billing software, being any easier to manage if someone is severely injured, ill, or impaired. And I suspect that's the point. Make getting the insurance you paid for so time consuming & impossible that you just give up & eat the debt yourself
Mar 20, 2023 at 5:25pmMastodon for Android
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
Healthcare in the United States is really going to rock when the provider phone tree dumps you into a AI chatbot that doesn't understand what you're saying and gives you incorrect/useless info for hours and there's no way to talk to a human because they fired all but one real person who is now split between 8 companies
Show threadJakeQuokkaMCMMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica Medibot: "Hey I had that too!" .... then goes completely offline silent.
Show threadDogzillaMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica Yes, but we can build personal chatbots to deal with phone trees and insurance company chatbots
Show threadhapbtMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica this already happened so let’s just hope the speech recognition gets better after a few more trillion dollars are spent
Show threadtbsMar 21, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica Pretty much nailed it 🎯
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 21, 2023
@tbs Thanks!
Show threadAnne JeffersonMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica Lots and lots of sympathy. At a former job, HR messed up the birthdate of a friend's child and then denied the labor and delivery costs as having occurred several days before the baby's birthday. Then several years later, they did the same thing to me! Can't pay for NICU if the baby hasn't been born. :o
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
@annejefferson oh no! That's really criminal. People should actually literally go to jail for that. It's theft
Show threadAnne JeffersonMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica In both cases it eventually got straightened out - and I hope your situation does too. Still incredibly frustrating - and time consuming - to deal with!
Show threadCoach Pāṇini ®Mar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica 💯
Show threadOlavMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica
We have Kaiser which is inclusive (everything in-house) which helps a lot for that sort of thing. But you still sometimes have to fight for care, especially 2nd opinions
Show threadbrennenMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica a couple of times now i've had to navigate the vagaries of US medical billing in the aftermath of an event which caused me some months of lingering cognitive impairment. the mind boggles at the sheer villainy and incompetence baked, in equal measure, into a system that has to be dealt with by people experiencing the worst parts of their lives. just a complete disaster, makes me want to light things on fire.
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
@brennen well said. And that's exactly it: incompetence, villainy, and apathy. It does inspire a very special sort of rage
Show threadBrandonMar 20, 2023

@AbandonedAmerica received a 3k bill for my wife after insurance denied it. She looked at it and said “I bet they accidentally submitted it to the dental department listed on the same card”. Sure enough she was right and I almost paid 3k that insurance was responsible for.

She called and the response was “lol oops we’ll try again”. How is that acceptable? If she wasn’t there and recognized the billing codes I’d have paid the thing.

Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
@Brandon yuuuup. Funny how the mistakes are always in their favor too.
Show threadA. RiveraMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica I hear you on that because yea, having to deal with health insurance is a byzantine pain in the ass that makes Vogons seem positively pleasant and efficient.
Show threadBrandonMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica also that scene from The Incredibles where the boss chews him out b/c his clients are mysteriously “penetrating the bureaucracy” in getting the bills paid.
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
@Brandon I forgot about that. Yes, that was clever
Show threadStan Wonn 🏳️‍🌈 🌹Mar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica Honestly, the US healthcare system is just horrible from the billing/insurance side. I have experience with single-payer systems (VA for me and my now-husband used to be on Medicaid) and frankly it’s a relief not having to deal with all that crap! That’s why I am a big supporter of #medicare4all.
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
@StanWonn I am too. Doubt we'll ever get it at the rate we're going but it is both the moral and logical choice
Show threadHasufinMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica Allow me to remove all doubt - it is DEFINITELY designed to make you give up and eat the debt. That is an explicit policy in medical billing, right up there with billing more to people who have less money (as they also lack the resources to fight the bills).
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
@Hasufin man I love this country. That's what it's all about, right there. The poisonous blackened heart of the United States
Show threadHasufinMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica Yeah. I was working helpdesk at a hospital and talked with the guy who used to handle billing.
I legit don't know why health insurance C-levels are alive.
Show threadGreg StolzeMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica
I have long felt that much in that area feels like a compromise between people who genuinely want to help, and people who want to erase the very idea of "help."
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
@GregStolze I worked in mental health for like a decade and that's very much how it was there. And the good people tend to leave when they're able.
Show threadJimmothy BagginsMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica you can say the integrity of the Healthcare system is as empty and in disrepair as the photos you post
Show threadMary Ann HornMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica . Yep. I did that once.
Show threadSiderea, Sibylla BostoniensisMar 20, 2023

@AbandonedAmerica

They don't do this sort of thing deliberately, but they absolutely profit off it - they not only have no incentive to fix faults in their computer systems that result in things like it being hard-to-impossible to fix birth dates (somewhere an insurance company software project manager is saying "Why would we ever need the DoB field to be editable? People's birthdays don't change. Go ahead and make it part of a multifield foreign key.") they actually have a financial incentive to leave such errors in.

Oh the stories I could tell you. Insurance company IT is utterly awful, because every bug is a profit center.

Show threadNathan A. StineMar 20, 2023
@AbandonedAmerica it's not that there is an inability to fix it, it's just that the problem doesn't negatively affect the company in anything but a trivial sense, so they have no incentive to fix it across as many systems as they would need to.
Show threadAbandoned AmericaMar 20, 2023
@stinerman I'm going one step further to point out they actively benefit from that problem, which is super scuzzy. So they make it worse.