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

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

@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.