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My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
- VirusNewbie 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- polairscience 3mo agoAhh. Yes, the delusional man who's psychiatric fibers were in tatters could have totally understood and digested that his actions that day were selfish. If only you had been there to say that to him. Setting aside the shaming part of your comment, it's indeed absolutely horrific for the family and everyone close to him.
- LoganDark 3mo agoIn all seriousness, people often commit suicide when they feel like nobody wants them around anyway. He may not have registered that his loss would be a negative to those around him, even those closest to him.
- VirusNewbie 3mo ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 3mo agoNo, selfish would be more like knowing it, being of reasonably sound mind, and doing it anyways. Being convinced of something by wonky brain chemistry isn't necessarily a personal failing.
- LoganDark 3mo agoI feel like ascribing it to "wonky brain chemistry" serves to erase agency. I read the article and there are very real and reoccurring reasons of incredible mistreatment for why this happened. It is not because he was simply unstable and decided to try suicide for no reason. He had such a reason that I am incredibly disappointed in the entire system that led to this.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> I feel like ascribing it to "wonky brain chemistry" serves to erase agency. Wonky brain chemistry can erase agency. (As can an empty bank account from an insurance denial!)
- LoganDark 3mo agoI mean, I don't agree with the assumption that he was simply irrational and chose this because he wasn't thinking straight. I would much rather believe that he had strong reasons for this and that there is something to be done about the circumstances that led to it. Suicide is more often than not a systemic failure and not simply an outlier to be ignored. If you read the article and see all the shit that he went through before he died it should be obvious that he's not the one at fault for breaking under that pressure. Not everyone has the strength to brave such bullshit.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> I mean, I don't agree with the assumption that he was simply irrational and chose this because he wasn't thinking straight. And I don't agree with the assertions that that's not a possibility.
- LoganDark 3mo agoI don't consider it a possibility that state of mind would not have been a result of his mistreatment. You seem to recognize it can be brought about by situations, and I consider that reasoning enough. You don't have to perfectly calculate suicide as the only practical answer in order for your actions to be reasoned. Even primal reasoning can count.
- LoganDark 3mo agoSure, suicide can be incredibly selfish, but there are other factors at play here. It's not like he just decided he wanted to harm everybody around him. There are basically always much stronger motivations that stem from very tragic mistreatment and that deserves more recognition than however morally incorrect or disrespectful to others it is to end one's own life. I say this as someone who has attempted and who knows multiple others who have attempted. None of those attempts were intended to harm anyone. They were meant to put an end to unbearable suffering that had no apparent other way out.
- goda90 3mo ago>The ensuing months led to a rotating cycle of failed outpatient treatment programs followed by ER visits, brief admissions, and premature discharges. And Randy kept getting worse. He became so unstable with paranoid delusions and psychosis that he was not safe to be around me or the children. He never came home. From TFA. This isn't someone who reasoned their way into suicide.
- i_idiot 3mo agoI think people who commit suicide really believe they actually help their families or the world is better off without them. So, no, they are far from cruel. They are considerate.
- mothballed 3mo agoThere are levels of depression (or other circumstances) at which people are actual drains on their family. While I would never recommend suicide, it is a rational personal choice for some of those with severe health problems that for whatever reason (financial, insurance, whatever) cannot be fixed.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago>There are levels of depression (or other circumstances) at which people are actual drains on their family. Committing suicide almost certainly guarantees further suicides within that close family. Children especially... years later. In certain social circles (teenage suicide), it heightens the risk of further teenage suicides, even among non-peers in some cases. Unless the facehugger has just laid an egg in your gut, suicide is never rational and its consequences will play out over decades.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> Committing suicide almost certainly guarantees further suicides within that close family. Not sure why this is downvoted. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/offsprings-risk-for-suicidal-behaviour-in-relation-to-parental-death-by-suicide-systematic-review-and-metaanalysis-and-a-model-for-familial-transmission-of-suicide/C450526CAF5F329AF48E656660DEB6A7 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-... "The experience of losing a parent to suicide is a strong and independent risk factor for suicidal behaviour in offspring."
- feoren 3mo agoBecause causation != correlation. This could just as easily be explained as "severe depression has a genetic factor".
- Lalabadie 3mo agoIf you want to direct blame, depression robbed all three of them of their future together, and their insurance allowed depression to progress until fatal. Hoping for someone to get ahold of themselves in the middle of mental illness is not an expectation grounded in reality.
- OgsyedIE 3mo agoExactly. We don't use the above commenter's framing for schizophrenia, OCD or psychosis deaths for this reason. We just have a cultural programming to say that anything that isn't very visible must be fake.
- mzs 3mo ago"I've never been suicidal..." That's why you can't understand.
- chasd00 3mo agopeople who are suicidal are insane (i have some experience here) they think the ending of their life is the logical next step, i wouldn't place too much blame. On the other hand, i think resentment by a dependent would be a natural reaction.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- rsyring 3mo agoThere are all kinds of nuances and complexities to the human condition, especially when it comes to something like depression. I think the parent comment, with it's implied blame/shame of the deceased, is missing a lot. As someone with depression, to others who might read this, know that there are those out there who care about what you are going through, have compassion, and don't need or want to blame you for what you are experiencing. There is a place for responsibility and ownership of consequences. But the parent comment isn't the way to do it.
- petilon 3mo agoYes, there is something wrong with the insurance industry. But there is something wrong with the hospitals, doctors and drug companies too. The whole system is broken. Hospitals try to eke out the most out of insurance companies, often providing services that are unnecessary. Pharmaceutical companies charge US patients significantly higher rates than in other countries. Don't put all the blame on insurance companies.
- goda90 3mo ago>Randy needed immediate psychiatric care, and as an emergency physician I knew the options. We put our trust in the mental health team at a local crisis receiving unit, and they kept Randy overnight in temporary safe housing where he could be observed. By morning they had devised a plan to transfer Randy to a retreat-like inpatient psychiatric facility that was in-network with our insurance. The psychiatrist felt Randy was very high risk, but that he could heal with eight weeks of inpatient treatment. We were told our insurance would cover it. >But six days into Randy’s eight-week hospital stay, our health insurance company denied any further inpatient care. >The facility appealed Randy’s case, providing psychiatrist’s notes that clearly outlined his need, but the outcome did not change. Because Randy had no prior history of mental illness, the insurance company determined he shouldn’t need to be hospitalized and stopped paying for his care. A day later Randy was forcibly discharged. This is definitely a case where the insurance company holds the majority of the blame.
- rayiner 3mo ago> This is definitely a case where the insurance company holds the majority of the blame. What facts are the basis of your conclusion? There is no health system in the developed world where a doctor's recommendation will guarantee expensive inpatient treatment without a layer of bureaucratic review.
- goda90 3mo agoThe goal should be to provide every human being with the best care possible. If a system can't handle that, then we need to assess why and make changes.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- recursive 3mo agoThis is a far cry from the gravity of the post, but here's my personal anecdote about trying to navigate health care and insurance. A month or two ago, I was trying to set up a pediatric dentist visit for my son. Not a medical emergency, but a matter of some urgency. I spent about three hours on a total of a dozen phone calls or so. Some to the insurer, and some to various dentist offices in the region to inquire about scheduling and logistics. I learned that I needed to switch my son's primary office before he would be eligible to receive care. This could only be done once per month. Fortunately, by luck, this would take effect at the close of business on that very day. Next I needed to find a covered provider. Of course, the insurer could not tell me which ones would have openings at short notice, so I had to call several. Then I learned that in order for a pediatric visit to be covered, it needed a referral from a general dentist. The pediatric office helped me find a dentist who could fill out this paperwork, which felt lucky. I verified that my policy worked with this dentist office. Several hours on the phone, but I had a sense of accomplishment for sorting it all out. The day of the appointment came. The visit went smoothly. Then I found out that it wouldn't be covered because the insurance will not cover pediatric dentistry above the age of 6, but my son is 7. I think I'm going to opt out of dental insurance altogether in the next enrollment. All the individual people seemed to be doing their best to help me, but the end result is a system that is impossible for me to use.
- all2 3mo agoI've seriously considered opting out of health insurance altogether and stuffing away the obscenely priced monthly expense into an interest yielding account. Insurance is nightmarish, and I don't really want to deal with it much anymore. I know this might appear foolish, but fighting with a corporation whose incentives are adverse to my own (both on the medical side and the insurance side) makes me a little sick to my stomach.
- mothballed 3mo agoI did that for much of my 20s and very glad I did. You are basically used parasitically by the Obamacare system as it caps the differential between young and elderly to the point it's well into the expected negative value, and you're young enough that the off chance of the bet going bad only results in declaring bankruptcy on a few years of professional salary.
- rayiner 3mo ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> I asked Google Gemini… Why?
- rayiner 3mo agoTo understand how doctor's recommendations for in-patient care are treated in the health system of another developed country?
- ceejayoz 3mo agoWhy do you trust Gemini to do that?
- gdulli 3mo agoMost people don't want to think any more than they absolutely have to.
- rayiner 3mo agoBecause LLMs are pretty good at summarizing facts from publicly available sources.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoLLMs are notoriously good at getting even basic facts wrong. Especially when the information ecosystem around the issue is... adversarial.
- rayiner 3mo agoSource? In my experience, LLMs are especially valuable in that setting. Human generated content tries to put a spin on facts. But with LLMs, you can pull the facts out of such content while making your assumptions explicit. For example, I could point you to this article talking about 12 month+ waiting lists for UK mental health treatment: https://www.rethink.org/news-and-stories/news-and-views/2025/people-more-likely-to-wait-longer-for-mental-health-treatment/ https://www.rethink.org/news-and-stories/news-and-views/2025.... What is the organization’s spin? Am I cherry picking this article in comparison to others? I don’t know! It seems like there’s a big advantage to an LLM synthesizing a result from a large corpus of articles that contain facts embedded within spin and narrative.
- socalgal2 3mo ago[flagged]
- mannanj 3mo agoWhat is evidence then? Something of choosing that is impossible or just impractical to meet, or who's goalposts can keep changing indefinitely?
- rayiner 3mo agoA bad result is not evidence that a system failed or did anything wrong. To show a problem with the system, you need to show, for example, that other systems do things differently in a way that would have avoided what happened here.
- nobodyandproud 3mo agoWhy is it not evidence?
- daheza 3mo agoAs someone who just recently was re-diagnosed for active major depression after a major back surgery this article hits very hard. I recently discussed inpatient treatments with my psychiatrist too. I can understand what the husband was feeling... that the nothing of death was greater than the feelings of life. It's difficult to work with healthcare in general - add a mental issue on top of that and it feels impossible. You have to constantly advocate for yourself since each doctor will only do what is required for their subspecialty and you also have to fight insurance on the other side. Specifically regarding mental related items are treated as lesser than physical issues. I have Kaiser who has actively been punished by the US Department of Labor [1](2026) [2](2021) for delays in behavioral health care and pushing for out of network therapist. They tried to push these therapist on me twice, both through RULA and it was really a terrible experience. The therapist literally ended my meeting 10 minutes into our discussion when I told him I hadn't finished reading the book he recommended. I am now with an in-house kaiser therapist that is working well. I worry about the psychiatric side of the house as well, they set me up to only meet with my psychiatrist once every three months. That doesn't feel frequent enough to get my medication tuned right. I don't see this getting better in the future with the current leadership in the US advocating for a "return control to the patients" by reducing SSRI prescriptions. [3] My only advice for people out there is to take their mental health seriously, if you are having suicidal thoughts talk to your doctor. It may end up being a difficult journey but its better than being alone. 1. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ebsa/ebsa20260210 https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ebsa/ebsa20260210 2. https://calmatters.org/health/2023/10/kaiser-permanente-california-behavioral-health-settlement/ https://calmatters.org/health/2023/10/kaiser-permanente-cali... 3. https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/announcing-new-initiatives-rfk-jr-continues-push-for-americans-to-discontinue-antidepressants https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/announcing-new-initiative...
- annzabelle 3mo agoI recommend if you're looking into inpatient treatment and you're not an acute danger to yourself or others, look into partial hospitalization programs and intensive outpatient programs instead. I know Kaiser covers some at least in Virginia. In my experience with family members, inpatient hospital stays at many hospitals in the US are one of the least therapeutic environments possible, and once you've gone through an ER or psych ER (which most of them make you do), you have no control over which hospital you end up at. In the end your stay is unlikely to be any more than 7 days. PHP programs on the other hand tend to fill the role that work had previously taken in someone's life for a few to several weeks. They're typically 9-3, held in office parks, and are mostly quality group therapy with a daily or weekly psych visit.
- JohnTHaller 3mo agoThe goal of their insurance company is to make a large return for their shareholders. And, thus, a large bonus for the C-suite execs. Their goal is not to provide care. In this particular instance, the insurance company saved money to give to shareholders and their C-suite by not treating the patient further. They lose no money by allowing him to die. This is all by design.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoThis happens with (theoretically) non-profit insurers, too. Like the BCBS networks.
- zehaeva 3mo agoI nominally agree with this sentiment. BCBS does have issues like this happen, but not at the same level others, in my experience. Anecdotally though, I've found that my current insurer (United) denies and delays care far, far, more often than when I had a similar plan with BCBS. And I'm not talking about small bills, my son was in the NICU for 41 days, at a cost of ~$150,000. Through BCBS I paid like a grand of that. United denies the most random things, a referral to a specialist, meds for on brand usage while they'll pay for other meds that are off brand, for instance. I do have a platinum level plan, I am _extremely_ lucky to have this. I know the vast majority of Americans, most of my friends and family, fight with their insurance companies for far less than my complaints.
- happytoexplain 3mo agoYes, that's what people are referring to when they say "wrong".
- tracker1 3mo agoI wish that rather than the closed govt medical programs we have... we simply funded a public, non-profit health insurance provider that is motivated by fiduciary responsibility, but not profit driven. While this may seem heartless as some would fall through the cracks, such as cases like tfa that wouldn't be covered, at least there would be more competition against the private insurance companies. I'm not a fan of fully socializing medicine, but having a non-profit with negotiating power in the mix could only help.
- mvdtnz 3mo ago[flagged]
- Lalabadie 3mo agoI've said a similar sentence on here in the past, but there's a large anti-tax sentiment in the US because their government is one of the most inefficient per dollar. People are against paying for nothing, not against paying for services. There's just no confidence that the amount of services rendered can change away from "as little as they can get away with", so there's no enthusiasm for paying at all.
- mothballed 3mo agoThe government is very efficient at redistributing your SS money from young broke workers to old more well off SS recipients. And at converting $ into guided missiles that blow up Iranian girls' schools. It's just that it's not practically possible to have "representatives" that actually represent the people in muh democracy in USA. See the massive unprecedent money that got poured in to make Massie lose his primary when he acted against the interest of Israel and to expose pedophiles in power.
- pyuser583 3mo agoI’ve been through this situation with family members. I understand the frustration and agony. I also understand the hesitancy to pay for two months at a “retreat-like inpatient psychiatric facility.” In publicly funded system, it’s likely facilities like this would not exist or would be strictly private pay. I’m not aware of any country that makes such a thing available on short notice like this. I also understand the frustration, as often times facilities like this are all that exist in terms of medium-term care. And often times some of their services are at least formally in-network. The understanding is you pay for it by selling your house. We’ve been tempted to do this (sell our house), but been advised against it - but the reasoning in our case is patient specific. I wish insurance was clearer about what covered and what isn’t. I wish we had more mainstream (not retreat-like) medium term care places. Maybe I’m misreading the phrase retreat-like. But id this isn’t something a public system would pay for, it seems inappropriate to blame a private system to not pay for it, unless it’s clearly in the wording. Regardless, mental health care in America stinks, and you can always argue over the details.
- rayiner 3mo agoIt sounds like this guy needed around-the-clock, in-patient care. That's inherently expensive. While those facilities exist in countries with publicly funded healthcare, there's a huge shortage of in-patient beds, so there is some mechanism to funnel patients to outpatient care.
- andrewinardeer 3mo agoMy state has the beds available, but no staff.
- arjie 3mo agoUsually beds in this context is a staffed operational bed. I was curious why they were complaining about beds back in the COVID era and looked into it. It means the physical object, the nursing staff, required clinician hours. They use the term “physical beds” in the rare contexts where those are significant.
- anonymousiam 3mo agoThis article makes a good case for the abolition of health insurance. If everybody had to pay for medical care, medical care would need to be affordable to survive. It's hard for me to believe that a doctor couldn't afford medical care for her husband. She just couldn't get outside of the box and consider that the treatment was more important than the cost.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> This article makes a good case for the abolition of health insurance. Yes. > If everybody had to pay for medical care, medical care would need to be affordable to survive. How would people with zero income afford it?
- readthenotes1 3mo agoThe way they used to before medical insurance took over that industry: charity
- ceejayoz 3mo agoSo everyone had their healthcare needs addressed in the 1800s? Which charities have the funding to cover a $1M NICU stay?
- foco_tubi 3mo agoThe more interesting hypothetical is: would a NICU stay still cost $1M if the factors inflating that cost (namely, insurance subsidizing hospital revenue) were no longer in place?
- ceejayoz 3mo agoI can assure you it wouldn't be $0, or anywhere near close to that. My kiddos were born the day before the third trimester and spent two months in the hospital. Staff it at minimum wage, cap the costs at just the stuff used, and you're still talking a lot of money.
- arjie 3mo agoIn my experience, one can always continue care if one is willing to pay. Insurance companies do not deny care; they deny claims for care. In fact, numerous times they make mistakes and deny valid claims. Only the healthcare provider can choose to not provide care: either because they believe they will not get paid or they believe you don’t need it or some other such reason. Considering this person has a high-paying job and it seems like a short-term intervention would have created a long-term positive outcome, it’s not clear to me why they didn’t simply insist on the care without insurance coverage. My contingency plans for these situations are to pay out of pocket and figure out reimbursement later. In practice, paying out of pocket is just a promise to pay out of pocket. Often one isn’t charged until afterwards and I experienced sufficient mechanisms to delay payment until the whole thing had been sorted out. Permanent conditions (like, say, brain death) are a different story. But in my case, the bill I was ostensibly facing was hundreds of thousands of dollars and I proceeded with it on the grounds that rapid intervention would yield results and I can figure out the payment structure later. If I were facing the worst case scenarios of a family medical bill bankruptcy or family member loss I think that usually I’d prefer the former. It’s hard to make a decision in the moment, but if the healthcare provider determines that more care is required and the insurance provider that it is not, I am more likely to follow the former though not without bound.
- foco_tubi 3mo ago> One isn’t charged until afterwards This is not a universal billing practice, often clinic visits are billed upfront before meeting with the provider.
- arjie 3mo agoLet me amend it to indicate the uncertainty I intended here by saying “often”. Most of my experience with US healthcare is with San Francisco and Austin, so readers may wish to adjust their view based on that.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tracker1 3mo agoI've had to go through this with treatments for my eyes... that I haven't been able to see a doctor on for about a year and a half because as a contractor my insurance sucks and even when I've had good insurance it was often problematic... wierd codes and then a back and forth call the insurance, call the provider only to ever get answers if I 3-way called them both and held them both to account. More than once I was on the hook for a $15k set of injections that I had to run on a credit card. At this point, I'm maxed out, paying out of pocket for what I can and it sucks... I'm hoping to convert to a City employee (temp) vs contractor which at least gets decent medical, but my own experience has me doubtful even then. I've worked my whole adult life, didn't even take vacation time through my 20's and 30's... and never planned to retire... I don't want to, but I'm facing a reality that may not give me a choice in the long run. I don't think shifting to public healthcare is the answer in the US... but would like something similar to fiduciary safeguards around medicine and insurance.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo ago> I am an emergency physician living in the U.S., and we had one of the top commercial health insurance plans. You see, dear, your critical error was in believing that psychiatry is “medicine”, and that mental health treatment is “health care”. Oh for sure, they present you “doctors” and “nurses” with the same credentials, wearing white lab coats, ties, scrubs, and even stethoscopes. They can prescribe “drugs” and run “hospitals”. From the outside, they are indistinguishable from physicians who treat the physical body, but it is all a satiric cosplay. It is done this way for reasons, chiefly not to scare people too much. Mental health should be considered more of the “Pre-Crime Division” or Department of Corrections For Stuff That’s Not Your Fault. Don’t ever believe they’re in “Health Care”. This is a fatal category error.
- foco_tubi 3mo agoBy chance, are you a Scientologist?
- snootypoot 3mo ago[dead]
- mitchbob 3mo agohttps://archive.ph/nLvxS https://archive.ph/nLvxS
- silexia 3mo agoShe doesn't mention the root issue; her and her colleagues absurdly high salaries and the tight limits on new doctors in the US that make medical care scarce and unaffordable but keep their salaries high.
- waltmck 3mo agoSince we're all sharing terrible insurance stories, I'll throw in my partner's. Of course this is not as bad as the OP, but it is still extremely frustrating. We are graduate students and get a pretty good health insurance through our university's BCBS plan. She is financially independent from her parents, but she is additionally involuntarily insured on her father's EmblemHealth plan with no right to remove herself (her father could do this for her, but has refused to). Last year she had some medical bills, and neither insurance company is willing to pay: the issue is that both plans have a clause that makes them secondary to any other insurance (this is apparently very common for student plans, and is also also somewhat common for additional family members on regular plans). For over a year now we have been sending certified mail to both insurers' coordination-of-benefits offices, but neither will acknowledge being the primary insurer and EmblemHealth has been ignoring us altogether for the last ~5 months. The generally recommended strategy in this situation is apparently to involve regulators. However, regulation is state-by-state and and our university is in Massachusetts while her father lives in New York. Massachusetts' Division of Insurance found that the Massachusetts insurer (BCBS) was correct that the New York insurer (EmblemHealth) should be primary, but they have no jurisdiction to force the New York insurer to accept this finding. The New York regulators were even more useless. New York's Department of Financial Services---the only state regulator for health insurance---responded that they had no jurisdiction to regulate the plan since it was self-funded (meaning that it is not technically insurance for regulatory purposes). The only remaining regulator was the US Department of Labor, but they eventually got back to us saying that they had no jurisdiction either: the problem is that my partner's father is a municipal employee of New York City, and for some complicated constitutional/political reasons the DoL isn't able to enforce labor laws on state/local governments. I basically don't know what to do now. We have been on a waitlist for a legal clinic for about 4 months with no end in sight, and in the meantime regularly get mail from medical debt collectors. This is despite having insurance and making considerable effort to do everything "right." Clearly something here is extremely broken.
- tsoukase 3mo agoSuch stories sound like horror science fiction to Europeans. Of course preventable deaths and health related mistakes happen there too but they are rarely the fault of insurance. If such a blunt event would happen to me, I could sue the insurance for a very large sum.
- euroderf 3mo agoAttributed to Churchill: "Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted." Haven't all other (non-universal) health coverage possibilities been exhausted ?