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What kind of an educated scientific person, working in health insurance and dealing with sick people, develops anything that makes this possible?
by michaeljx 3y ago
What kind of an educated scientific person, working in health insurance and dealing with sick people, develops anything that makes this possible?
- manicennui 3y agoI worked on healthcare software for over a decade. The healthcare industry attracts the lowest quality people generally. Software engineers aren't giving up working at FAANG to go work in healthcare. A significant portion of UHG's revenue comes from billing and other healthcare software. Most of it is under their Optum brand.
- s5300 3y ago[dead]
- lispisok 3y agoRegular people will do horrible things to keep their paycheck coming. It's an underrated phenomena of humanity.
- irrational 3y ago[flagged]
- all2 3y agoIt's a feature of humanity. We are intrinsically broken and prone to self preservation. No matter the systems we come up with to given our conduct, we always revert to our basic character traits.
- HellDunkel 3y agoI strongly disagree with how this is presented. Doing half-assed or even passionate work for greedy insurance companies is not a horrible thing to do. Not thinking of how these companies can be reigned in and acting accordingly is far worse. We need to stop offloading moral responsibility from the people in charge to the regulae folks.
- archerx 3y agoThey are all complicit, the people in charge have no power without their underlings.
- uoaei 3y agoThey accepted the role and fulfilled the duties that were asked of them by the company. They had all the chances to intervene or divest before such a model made it to production.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThis horrendous behavior of health insurance companies in the U.S. is widely understood, reported on, and documented to cause harm and death. If you choose to work for them, you’re of the same ilk of people who work for pyramid schemes and arms manufacturers.
- lispisok 3y agoHealth insurance companies have a long and documented history of doing horrible horrible things. Are you really saying the rank and file at health insurance companies who are collecting middle class salaries at a white collar job denying people's claims for an MRI for a possible brain tumor have no moral responsibility? If you can't start with being the change you want to see in the world there is no hope
- HellDunkel 3y agoI think the rank and file at health insurance companies need to be held accountable when breaking the law. The law itself must be designed in a way to prevent such behavior eg.: Any action such as trying to deny medical service or outsource decision making into a gray zone such as ai shall be punished hard- also on an individual level. It is utterly unnecessary to discuss the individuals moral obligations or to start another meta discussion on capitalism. This type of reasoning is extremly harmful as it deflects the needed discussion about the law. You probably agree with me. It just struck me that our misunderstanding comes from the different approaches europe and the us are following. While we tend to make up rules in advance, the american strategy is often about giving the market more options and having it regulate itself by class action lawsuites down the line. When we talk about health you must admit the „free market“ strategy has failed and europe is doing a far better job.
- twiceaday 3y agoOne person doesn't do this, a company does, a hierarchy of jobs. An entity without a conscience built from entities with a conscience. Very clever.
- t-writescode 3y agoThe banality of evil.
- corethree 3y agoThe irony here is that the entities with a conscience are very much aware of what their doing. Very very much aware. So there's not much difference is there? Actually there is. The difference is in a quirk of moral evolutionary psychology. The tragedy of the commons. As an individual each of those entities contributes negligible evil to society. In aggregate that negligible evil becomes prominent. Morality is divided up into fractional shares and sold like a collateral debt obligation. Every time you step into a car and let that thing spew green house gases into the air you are contributing to the destruction of the world. The individual is still guilty. We call corporations evil, but what we don't realize is that corporations are a mirror of humanity.
- thelastgallon 3y agoThere is only one rule: shareholder profits
- jghn 3y agoYou're making a lot of assumptions here. Insurance is there to make a buck. Nothing more.
- ranting-moth 3y ago"Would you do X for $Y?" Most of the time you can increase Y to get the answer "yes". In many cases Y can even be factored out by changing it to "Would you do X so you wouldn't get fired?" Empirical answers differ a lot from people's theoretical principles.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoPlenty of folks here work on bombs for killing people, surveillance instruments for govt and police to use for spying on citizens, etc - people take paychecks and they take orders The business of insurance is to make money by denying care that people paid for
- FpUser 3y agoWhat on Earth makes you think that there are less assholes in educated part of the population?
- renewiltord 3y agoIt's a common expression on HN and Reddit that people don't "care" about their job or their coworkers. They produce output, they get paid. Simple exchange. Code for money. So why does it surprise you that someone would see building this as just an exchange?