"Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay": Blue Cross Approved Surgeries Then Refused to Pay

Responding to a now-deleted comment that seemed to suggest a violent response:

What would be the point, honestly?

Calling for his assassination would, rightly in my opinion, be prosecutable.

I'm too demoralized at the moment to hope for what I'd consider an appropriate response by state or federal governments / courts.

The third most likely solution, revolution / civil war, would probably cause far more suffering than any fixes it might enable.

I'm curious if America will soon reach a tipping point where a sizeable portion of its population actually makes an effort to emigrate, rather than just talking about it.

> What would be the point, honestly?

Changing insurer's incentive landscape.

I think the provider side will be the breaking point. You'll start seeing hospitals stop accepting insurance, especially if Medicare goes away, and everything will be cash based. Things will be expensive until hospitals have cut enough fat/figured out the real cost of everything, and this will be a dangerous time to have an illness.

Whether this will usher in a free market utopia remains to be seen, but I think the health insurance industry is going to collapse under the weight of its own greed.

How? Congress has abdicated its role. Trump and his cronies aren’t interested. And the GOP is actively disenfranchising anybody that they consider “other”. State and local governments are only slightly better.

I’m with the poster who suggested emigration. If this chaos continues, I’ll be tempted to renew my UK passport and/or apply for an Irish passport.

I’ve seen people use this argument, but I think it fails to consider the complexity of the situation.

The moment a company capitulates as the result of murder, they’ve now incentivized more murder.

Such attacks on the people running these companies can only impede change I think by forcing companies to become more entrenched in their existing practices.

> The moment a company capitulates as the result of murder, they’ve now incentivized more murder.

ooor they're incentivized to force some legal resolution to make crowd "believe in system working" instead of "despair in neither system nor murder working"

With the majority of payments getting approved, why would providers stop accepting insurance?

If Medicare goes away, much of the healthcare system will simply implode rather than getting more expensive. Looking it up, the system my hospital is part of gets 36% of revenues from Medicare. I expect my hospital is slightly higher than that.

They're already incentivized to effectively murder by denying care.

> I'm curious if America will soon reach a tipping point where a sizeable portion of its population actually makes an effort to emigrate, rather than just talking about it.

Emigrate where? The parts of the world where quality of life is equal or better don't just have open door policies letting Americans in freely, last I checked. I imagine it's going to get even harder.

Hopefully they'll beg for ordinary justice to be applied to them, so vigilante justice isn't the only kind that can possibly touch them.

Without defending or justifying the practices of health insurance companies (I’m going through a hellish denial/appeal process at the moment), there’s a major difference between advocating for and resorting to violence as a way of attempting to bring about change and the very real consequences of a broken system.

The world is filled with complexity and systems that are broken. They require thoughtful solutions, not chaos. Setting aside the moral and ethical dilemmas that arise, advocating for the murder of company leaders is essentially a roll of the chaos dice attached to a wish that somehow the resulting situation will sort itself out.

If you remove all moral/ethical considerations (not the least of which is that blame is shared by many people), it’s far from obvious that the result would resemble the thing people want. Pragmatically, it’s a poorly considered idea that introduces potential for equivalent or greater harms.

I would prob say the hospital knows the optimal price already. It might not be 100% applicable to the US but here is an example in Ireland, if I go to the hospital without any referral or by not being brought in an ambulance which would make it free, I have to pay. The funny thing is that they ask you beforehand if you have insurance and substantially increase the price of an overnight stay, etc if you do, to which point insurers are suggesting customers to withhold such a fact and lower the bill.

> advocating for the murder of company leaders is essentially a roll of the chaos dice attached to a wish that somehow the resulting situation will sort itself out.

I think this misses the 'fuck it, I'm going out like a grenade' aspect. Someone facing death or long-term painful chronic illness due to lack of access to medical care, and who has the perception that this is in part or wholly due to health insurance problems, might not care that they're as you said, rolling the chaos dice. They won't be around for long to deal with those consequences. They might want to roll those dice as a desperate attempt to exert some control, to make some kind of statement, to a world they feel has trodden on them.

There's a kind of logic to it, one borne from pain and desperation. But there's a reason the cliche about a cornered rat exists.

> I think this misses the 'fuck it, I'm going out like a grenade' aspect.

I think this is very separate from the disturbingly popular trend to advocate for violence as a solution.

I think in the case of something like healthcare, which can be literally life and death, these are not entirely separate. Many cheered LM's actions because they or someone they knew had been hurt by the healthcare insurance industry in the US, which again goes back to those feelings of pain, desperation and lack of control that they feel.

I do agree that the trend for the more average person to be okay with or even advocate for violence as a solution is disturbing. But a massive part of why it's disturbing is that it's a symptom. There are always fringe groups who resort to it as their primary approach, but when your regular person starts looking at violence as the way to solve things, there's some kind of broader sickness happening - a large scale societal malaise.

My great grandmother used to compare war, revolution, mass civil unrest and other such breakouts of violence as a fever for the body that is humanity; She'd lived through far too many of these fevers. They're rarely idiopathic, and while they might help fight off the current sickness, they also often killed. And even if you survive a fever, it's never a particularly pleasant experience.

No where would have an open door policy for a sizeable portion of the population. It's not that easy to legally move anywhere and the systems in place are designed for around the number they currently process.

Explain to me how care denial is non-violent.

I don't know that stochastic terrorism is actually illegal in the US, especially if you're not a person of note. I'm pretty sure it's legal to say "Someone should really shoot that guy, he deserves to die and I hope someone does it."

Now, it might violate Hacker News's policies and get deleted, but that's different from it being against the law.

Words have meaning. Care denial is a serious problem that causes much harm and requires a solution, but to call it violent is to make the word meaningless.

I'm sure there is a line where it's OK to say on HackerNews, but also clearly hints at "where are Mario Bros. when you need them".

Maybe we need more of plausible deniability.