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I want to complain a little about the journalism (not) being done here. Because I read this article, and I read the (better, but still lacking) Bloomberg Law ar

I want to complain a little about the journalism (not) being done here. Because I read this article, and I read the (better, but still lacking) Bloomberg Law article it links/rewrites, and I still have no idea what's happening. The law firm says the surgeon made false claims. (Which claims? Were they false?) The surgeon reacted with some twitter grandstanding saying she was on the side of the women she cares for who are battling cancer. (Noble, but irrelevant. She can tell the truth for a good cause or lie for a good cause. Which did she do?) UHC's spokesperson makes a big show of saying there are "no insurance-related circumstances that would ever require a physician to step out of surgery" and they would "never ask or expect that." Happens all the time actually, in part because if you don't work on the insurance company's schedule and answer their calls, you may not be able to talk to them for weeks, and your patient is denied in the meantime. But is that what was happening here? Apparently nobody thought to ask or include that information. The implication of this news item is that UHC has hired a shakedown operation to chill criticism on social media. Big if true. But it seems to really matter whether the people on either side are telling the truth. Somebody should report that out. Alas, I guess "big company vs plucky surgeon in social media spat" is a simple script that requires no work, we don't need to be curious about who the hero(ine) and the villain are.

dingnuts 2y ago
>Alas, I guess "big company vs plucky surgeon in social media spat" is a simple script that requires no work, we don't need to be curious about who the hero(ine) and the villain are. spoken like someone who doesn't have a chronic illness requiring an expensive medication to be delivered every month for the rest of their life, who every year has to fight with the insurance company about the fact that multiple sclerosis does not go away and that the medication is still needed, and yet STILL has lapses in receiving the pre-approved and approved and re-approved treatment which causes new symptoms to occur and old ones to relapse while the bureaucrat at the insurance company who is incentivized to give you the runaround plays delay deny delay deny delay over the medication that has been effective for YEARS and will be needed indefinitely. No, we really do not need to be curious about who the villain is. If UHC is worried about their image, maybe they should DO THE THING THEIR CUSTOMERS FUCKING PAY THEM TO DO
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > maybe they should DO THE THING THEIR CUSTOMERS FUCKING PAY THEM TO DO Health insurance in America is broadly profitable. But note that UHC just paying out claims puts them in the same place as California home insurers. Part of the job of a health insurer is to deny unnecessary claims, to be a check on providers, both in procedures and their pricing.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > Health insurance in America is broadly profitable Health insurance is actually a lot less profitable than most big businesses. Something like half as profitable as the S&P 500 average. But ignoring that, there are also big non-profit insurers. They aren't appreciably different. There's a big misconception that if we could just remove profit from our healthcare system every problem would be solved. However, if you look at where healthcare dollars go, profit and administrative overhead (insurance, hospital admin, etc.) are a single digit percentage of overall spending. If you could wave your magic wand and make it go away tomorrow, things would barely change. Note that even countries with socialized medicine have administrative overhead in the single digit percentage range, so it's not actually possible to drive it to zero. We severely overestimate how much of our healthcare dollars go to profits and executive compensation. I think because those are the only safe targets to be mad at. Nobody wants to engage in conversations about getting surgeons to take lower compensation or limiting certain types of care (which is very much a thing in any medicine system). American healthcare is expensive, but we Americans also consume (and demand) much more healthcare than elsewhere in the world.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      We have a lot of unnecessary gatekeeping. Prescriptions come to mind. Unless it’s addictive or subject to group effects (e.g. antibiotics), it should be OTC. If someone kills themselves self administering another YouTube cure, that’s on the influencer and the patient.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Aurornis 2y ago
> The law firm says the surgeon made false claims. (Which claims? Were they false?) The letter seems clear to me, and unfortunately for the doctor they have receipts (phone call recordings and the paperwork) The biggest problem for the doctor is that they have a record of the doctor conceding that the wrong paperwork was submitted by her office (hence the call) and that the UHC rep asked for her to call back when convenient (not in the middle of surgery). I think the UHC doctor got carried away, assumed all mistakes were on UHC’s end rather than her own admin staff, and then went to TikTok to tell a viral story with an exaggerated (at best) version of events. > Alas, I guess "big company vs plucky surgeon in social media spat" is a simple script that requires no work, we don't need to be curious about who the hero(ine) and the villain are. This mentality that we must pick a side, where one side is good and the other side is bad, is a huge problem with social media ragebait. We can admit that the surgeon was wrong to make a viral TikTok with information that was somewhere between very misleading and an outright lie. Admitting this doesn’t make UHC the good guy or the hero. You don’t have to pick a side. You shouldn’t automatically assume viral TikToks are true because they are targeted at companies you dislike.
- xp84 2y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, I still appreciate the propaganda value of a story even if it's full of half-truths like this one, because it's time for a reckoning for these companies. There's a tiny, like 1% chance, that someday we'll have the opportunity to institute single payer and kill these businesses full of sickening, greedy ghouls overnight, and anything that helps convince people of their sins so that they won't doubt that it's worth doing, I'm okay with. They've earned it with their many, many, 100% factual bad deeds. And they've never been above lying. I admit that taking this attitude toward falsehoods isn't 100% ethical, judged by itself, but if it helps to end a system that has killed many thousands and will continue to do until it is abolished, this is a rare case where I'm ok with the ends justifying the means.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >As far as I'm concerned, I still appreciate the propaganda value of a story even if it's full of half-truths like this one, because it's time for a reckoning for these companies. Just like "2 weeks to flatten the curve" and "masks don't work"? There's no way that "the ends justifies the means, a little lie to advance our cause" would backfire, right?
jrflowers 2y ago
> Alas, I guess "big company vs plucky surgeon in social media spat" is a simple script that requires no work > UHC's spokesperson makes a big show of saying there are "no insurance-related circumstances that would ever require a physician to step out of surgery" and they would "never ask or expect that." Happens all the time actually You make a good point. UHC has said something that, according to your direct knowledge, is patently untrue, and yet this article contains nothing accusatory against the surgeon that said something contradictory to the statement that you assert is completely wrong. If one party says something wrong and another party contradicts them, reporting that is a failure of journalism becau
- gruez 2y ago
  > [...] reporting that is a failure of journalism becau well? Don't leave us hanging!
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    Well as mitchelist points out we don’t even know what claims were made. The third paragraph of this article reads > On Jan. 7, a plastic surgeon named Elisabeth Potter posted a video of herself on Instagram claiming that UnitedHealthcare called her mid-surgery and asked her to justify an in-patient stay for a woman who has breast cancer and needed a surgical procedure to treat it. Potter then claimed that the insurer denied the patient an overnight stay and threatened her with legal action for her posts. Are these claims? What does “surgical procedure” mean? In what way is she using the word “denied”? It says UHC threatened her with legal action for her posts but, as mitchelist has surmised, we don’t know what she said or if she said anything at all. While the article articulates exactly what the surgeon said about UHC and links directly to her video of her saying it [1]… does it? Who knows what’s going on? I’d write more here but I am using speech to text because my dominant hand is stuck inside a jar of honey and my wife’s cries of “stop making a fist” (whatever that means) are getting picked up by my microphone. 1 https://www.instagram.com/p/DEid-1npNbA/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/p/DEid-1npNbA/?hl=en
phendrenad2 2y ago
I don't know much about Fortune magazine, but Wikipedia says: "The magazine competes with Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek in the national business magazine category and distinguishes itself with long, in-depth feature articles" Which seems incredibly ironic given that this article is 3 paragraphs.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  1)It's not, it's 9-10. 2)This isn't a "feature article." Maybe save judgement on journalists until you can parse 5th-grade-reading-level sentences correctly.
  - xu_ituairo 2y ago
    Your response feels unnecessarily unkind
    - bradleyishungry 2y ago
      When you comment in bad faith you get unkind responses
      - phendrenad2 2y ago
        And when people assume bad faith, they needlessly produce unkind responses, which is what happened here. EDIT: Nope, I checked his comments, every single one is "you clearly know nothing about <blank>" and the next one is "you clearly know nothing about <something else>". Total Hacker News Redditization happening before our eyes.
    - phendrenad2 2y ago
      He thinks this is Reddit, where debate by "gotcha" is the norm.
KennyBlanken 2y ago
> The law firm says the surgeon made false claims. (Which claims? Were they false?) This is in the Fortune story. UHC provided a direct quote, right after some text you quoted, and the post continues on with the claims the lawyers make. >The implication of this news item is that UHC has hired a shakedown operation to chill criticism on social media. Big if true. But it seems to really matter whether the people on either side are telling the truth. Implication? UHC uses the services of a high profile law firm that openly advertises itself as specializing in "defamation matters and representing clients facing high-profile reputational attacks" and, sent a surgeon treating a UHC patient, a C&D letter, over a social media post. The firm worked for Dominion - and if anyone cares to look back, their record, like nearly every other electronic voting company, isn't very good. There's really nothing in the story that is unbelievable, and by your own admission we can see how they very carefully phrased it as 'never asked or expected'. This means she'd have to prove that missed calls resulted in delayed care for UHC patients - likely possible, but cumbersome... Frankly it seems like you didn't read the article fully, or you're being disingenuous.
polski-g 2y ago
[flagged]
sneak 2y ago
I agree, but somehow when a lot of people fall on the “summary execution is warranted and encouraged” side of this debate, the specifics of any single given case end up far below the noise floor.
trod1234 2y ago
I was thinking these same things. In fact the original author was of such low journalistic integrity I assumed it must be generated by AI. Now that might be mistaken, there is no proof one way or the other that I can see, but this does seem to mirror problem areas in AI generated writing. I wish I had my time and attention that I spent on this back.

dingnuts 2y ago

>Alas, I guess "big company vs plucky surgeon in social media spat" is a simple script that requires no work, we don't need to be curious about who the hero(ine) and the villain are. spoken like someone who doesn't have a chronic illness requiring an expensive medication to be delivered every month for the rest of their life, who every year has to fight with the insurance company about the fact that multiple sclerosis does not go away and that the medication is still needed, and yet STILL has lapses in receiving the pre-approved and approved and re-approved treatment which causes new symptoms to occur and old ones to relapse while the bureaucrat at the insurance company who is incentivized to give you the runaround plays delay deny delay deny delay over the medication that has been effective for YEARS and will be needed indefinitely. No, we really do not need to be curious about who the villain is. If UHC is worried about their image, maybe they should DO THE THING THEIR CUSTOMERS FUCKING PAY THEM TO DO

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> maybe they should DO THE THING THEIR CUSTOMERS FUCKING PAY THEM TO DO Health insurance in America is broadly profitable. But note that UHC just paying out claims puts them in the same place as California home insurers. Part of the job of a health insurer is to deny unnecessary claims, to be a check on providers, both in procedures and their pricing.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > Health insurance in America is broadly profitable Health insurance is actually a lot less profitable than most big businesses. Something like half as profitable as the S&P 500 average. But ignoring that, there are also big non-profit insurers. They aren't appreciably different. There's a big misconception that if we could just remove profit from our healthcare system every problem would be solved. However, if you look at where healthcare dollars go, profit and administrative overhead (insurance, hospital admin, etc.) are a single digit percentage of overall spending. If you could wave your magic wand and make it go away tomorrow, things would barely change. Note that even countries with socialized medicine have administrative overhead in the single digit percentage range, so it's not actually possible to drive it to zero. We severely overestimate how much of our healthcare dollars go to profits and executive compensation. I think because those are the only safe targets to be mad at. Nobody wants to engage in conversations about getting surgeons to take lower compensation or limiting certain types of care (which is very much a thing in any medicine system). American healthcare is expensive, but we Americans also consume (and demand) much more healthcare than elsewhere in the world.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    We have a lot of unnecessary gatekeeping. Prescriptions come to mind. Unless it’s addictive or subject to group effects (e.g. antibiotics), it should be OTC. If someone kills themselves self administering another YouTube cure, that’s on the influencer and the patient.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Aurornis 2y ago

> The law firm says the surgeon made false claims. (Which claims? Were they false?) The letter seems clear to me, and unfortunately for the doctor they have receipts (phone call recordings and the paperwork) The biggest problem for the doctor is that they have a record of the doctor conceding that the wrong paperwork was submitted by her office (hence the call) and that the UHC rep asked for her to call back when convenient (not in the middle of surgery). I think the UHC doctor got carried away, assumed all mistakes were on UHC’s end rather than her own admin staff, and then went to TikTok to tell a viral story with an exaggerated (at best) version of events. > Alas, I guess "big company vs plucky surgeon in social media spat" is a simple script that requires no work, we don't need to be curious about who the hero(ine) and the villain are. This mentality that we must pick a side, where one side is good and the other side is bad, is a huge problem with social media ragebait. We can admit that the surgeon was wrong to make a viral TikTok with information that was somewhere between very misleading and an outright lie. Admitting this doesn’t make UHC the good guy or the hero. You don’t have to pick a side. You shouldn’t automatically assume viral TikToks are true because they are targeted at companies you dislike.

xp84 2y ago
As far as I'm concerned, I still appreciate the propaganda value of a story even if it's full of half-truths like this one, because it's time for a reckoning for these companies. There's a tiny, like 1% chance, that someday we'll have the opportunity to institute single payer and kill these businesses full of sickening, greedy ghouls overnight, and anything that helps convince people of their sins so that they won't doubt that it's worth doing, I'm okay with. They've earned it with their many, many, 100% factual bad deeds. And they've never been above lying. I admit that taking this attitude toward falsehoods isn't 100% ethical, judged by itself, but if it helps to end a system that has killed many thousands and will continue to do until it is abolished, this is a rare case where I'm ok with the ends justifying the means.
- gruez 2y ago
  >As far as I'm concerned, I still appreciate the propaganda value of a story even if it's full of half-truths like this one, because it's time for a reckoning for these companies. Just like "2 weeks to flatten the curve" and "masks don't work"? There's no way that "the ends justifies the means, a little lie to advance our cause" would backfire, right?

jrflowers 2y ago

> Alas, I guess "big company vs plucky surgeon in social media spat" is a simple script that requires no work > UHC's spokesperson makes a big show of saying there are "no insurance-related circumstances that would ever require a physician to step out of surgery" and they would "never ask or expect that." Happens all the time actually You make a good point. UHC has said something that, according to your direct knowledge, is patently untrue, and yet this article contains nothing accusatory against the surgeon that said something contradictory to the statement that you assert is completely wrong. If one party says something wrong and another party contradicts them, reporting that is a failure of journalism becau

gruez 2y ago
> [...] reporting that is a failure of journalism becau well? Don't leave us hanging!
- jrflowers 2y ago
  Well as mitchelist points out we don’t even know what claims were made. The third paragraph of this article reads > On Jan. 7, a plastic surgeon named Elisabeth Potter posted a video of herself on Instagram claiming that UnitedHealthcare called her mid-surgery and asked her to justify an in-patient stay for a woman who has breast cancer and needed a surgical procedure to treat it. Potter then claimed that the insurer denied the patient an overnight stay and threatened her with legal action for her posts. Are these claims? What does “surgical procedure” mean? In what way is she using the word “denied”? It says UHC threatened her with legal action for her posts but, as mitchelist has surmised, we don’t know what she said or if she said anything at all. While the article articulates exactly what the surgeon said about UHC and links directly to her video of her saying it [1]… does it? Who knows what’s going on? I’d write more here but I am using speech to text because my dominant hand is stuck inside a jar of honey and my wife’s cries of “stop making a fist” (whatever that means) are getting picked up by my microphone. 1 https://www.instagram.com/p/DEid-1npNbA/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/p/DEid-1npNbA/?hl=en

phendrenad2 2y ago

I don't know much about Fortune magazine, but Wikipedia says: "The magazine competes with Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek in the national business magazine category and distinguishes itself with long, in-depth feature articles" Which seems incredibly ironic given that this article is 3 paragraphs.

KennyBlanken 2y ago
1)It's not, it's 9-10. 2)This isn't a "feature article." Maybe save judgement on journalists until you can parse 5th-grade-reading-level sentences correctly.
- xu_ituairo 2y ago
  Your response feels unnecessarily unkind
  - bradleyishungry 2y ago
    When you comment in bad faith you get unkind responses
    - phendrenad2 2y ago
      And when people assume bad faith, they needlessly produce unkind responses, which is what happened here. EDIT: Nope, I checked his comments, every single one is "you clearly know nothing about <blank>" and the next one is "you clearly know nothing about <something else>". Total Hacker News Redditization happening before our eyes.
  - phendrenad2 2y ago
    He thinks this is Reddit, where debate by "gotcha" is the norm.

KennyBlanken 2y ago

> The law firm says the surgeon made false claims. (Which claims? Were they false?) This is in the Fortune story. UHC provided a direct quote, right after some text you quoted, and the post continues on with the claims the lawyers make. >The implication of this news item is that UHC has hired a shakedown operation to chill criticism on social media. Big if true. But it seems to really matter whether the people on either side are telling the truth. Implication? UHC uses the services of a high profile law firm that openly advertises itself as specializing in "defamation matters and representing clients facing high-profile reputational attacks" and, sent a surgeon treating a UHC patient, a C&D letter, over a social media post. The firm worked for Dominion - and if anyone cares to look back, their record, like nearly every other electronic voting company, isn't very good. There's really nothing in the story that is unbelievable, and by your own admission we can see how they very carefully phrased it as 'never asked or expected'. This means she'd have to prove that missed calls resulted in delayed care for UHC patients - likely possible, but cumbersome... Frankly it seems like you didn't read the article fully, or you're being disingenuous.

polski-g 2y ago

[flagged]

sneak 2y ago

I agree, but somehow when a lot of people fall on the “summary execution is warranted and encouraged” side of this debate, the specifics of any single given case end up far below the noise floor.

trod1234 2y ago

I was thinking these same things. In fact the original author was of such low journalistic integrity I assumed it must be generated by AI. Now that might be mistaken, there is no proof one way or the other that I can see, but this does seem to mirror problem areas in AI generated writing. I wish I had my time and attention that I spent on this back.