Impossible. The ACA fixed all the insurance company problems. We were assured of that! And we kept our insurance plans too! And our doctors!

Don't know who you are trying to parody here. Liberals weren't too hot on the ACA that actually got passed. The best you will hear pretty much any liberal say about the ACA is that it's better than what we had before, but that's about as low a bar as you can establish

No, there are still plenty of for profit insurance companies profiteering on increasing marginal costs to pay for their increased administrative costs.

And they always try to deny services a few days early.

Name a private insurance company and i can give you a grade.

Medical mutual is the worse by far. Three days then deny, but what is worse is they will have a last covered bed day of Friday, schedule concurrent review the following monday, and then deny approval for the weekend. The person is either stuck with an out of network bill for these two days or we eat it.

Anthem recently denied me on an old hispanic man who sees ghosts due to advanced parkinsons pn the last days of his hospital admission. He was hard to place due to covid in nursing homes, not speaking english, and seeing ghosts as a behavioral disturbance. He couldn't leave the hospital because the last time we dc'd him the police brought him back with a bunch of dog bites. So all of their in network facilites were closed due to covid, the facilies we got to ask for single case agreements were denied, and then they denied him for being in the hospital too long. During this time i called the anthem behavioral health case management team and asked for help and they were like we read the notes we wouldnt be doing anything different. Scheduled a peer to peer with a medical doctor to ask for help and when i finally got medical director we just argued about whether this pt should be in the hospital or not and he referred me back to the case management team, and denied onward service.

I finally have a phone number for humana UR that a human answers rather than automated systems and giving the same demographics three times in different call centers.

I have the best experiences with Aetna. They give their clients time to heal and they aren't hard to work with.

Social workers working for these companies aren't even doing social work, they are checking boxes and harming people for profits that aren't even their own.

As a profession we collectively refer going to work for for-profit insurance companies are selling your soul. We have to sell our souls every once in awhile though to get any sort if quality of life as a service profession.

Big difference between 40k and 60k.

Oh, Cigna has always been professional and courteous and eager to problem solve with me.

Humana can go either way.

United Health Care gets really weird about the use if benzodiazepines on seniors with dementia and other major neurocognitive disorders because they aren't a proven treatment for dementia...but nothing is. They don't bother you about anti psychotics and mood stabilizers though.

The democratic plan of medicare for all administrated by these guys scares the shit out of me.




Max Baucus really sounded the alarms that he smelled a rat.

This post was edited by Skinned on May 28 2020 09:50am

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/trump-says-the-us-will-cut-ties-with-world-health-organization.html

Trump says the U.S. will cut ties with World Health Organization


President Donald Trump announced Friday that the United States will cut ties with the World Health Organization.

“China has total control over the World Health Organization despite only paying $40 million per year compared to what the United States has been paying, which is approximately $450 million a year,” Trump said during a press conference from the White House Rose Garden.

Trump has repeatedly criticized the WHO’s response to the coronavirus, which has hit the U.S. worse than any other country, amid scrutiny of his own administration’s response to the pandemic.

Earlier this month, Trump threatened to permanently cut off U.S. funding of the WHO. In a letter, he said that if the WHO “does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization.”

On Friday, Trump said WHO “failed to make the requested greatly needed reform” and the U.S. “will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs.”

The WHO’s funding runs in two-year budget cycles. For the 2018 and 2019 funding cycle, the U.S. paid a $237 million required assessment as well as $656 million in voluntary contributions, averaging $446 million a year and representing about 14.67% of its total budget, according to WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic.

On May 20, WHO officials said they worried emergency programs will suffer if the president permanently pulled U.S. funding from the international agency.

Most funding from the United States goes directly out to the program that helps countries in “all sorts of fragile and difficult settings,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said at the time.

Without an alternative there's really no point to leaving the WHO. They're not perfect, but they're the only game in town. The only effect this will have is China having even more pull over the WHO and us continuing to shrink our influence on the world stage. It's a bad move no matter what your goals are.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on May 29 2020 02:21pm

The issue is that this makes Trump look like he's being tough on China. Optics are the only thing that matters as opposed to the actual ramifications. He's a showman.

This, exactly. Now he is opening the door for more China influence in these world organizations.

anyone still doubting that America is losing its standing on a global scale? This move is counterproductive to what he is saying. The WHO provided the US with the ability to have eyes and ears in China free from any filters china puts on.

terrible fucking move.

Holy shit those WHO idiots are doubling down.

yep and too many pro-CCP cheerleaders are against this move. it’s clear the WHO is controlled by CCP no matter how much money is thrown at it so why bother with money

You're misunderstanding the move. It's about pulling the rug out from under the WHO's reputation. The goal, aside from saving some money, is to delegitimize the WHO as a 'global' institution which is really representing the international community. It fits neatly into the larger pattern of Trump being really hostile to all forms and institutions of global governance.

At it's core, this is a disagreement about how the U.S. should exert influence in the world: via influence within institutions of global governance like the WHO or the UN, or via a system of bi- and trilateral cooperation between like-minded nations.
In the concrete case here, we have a global institution in which the U.S. was shouldering a disproportionate share of the burden without being rewarded with a correspondingly disproportionate amount of power, and with the institution furthering the geopolitical goals of its rival China.



Not saying that I necessarily agree with this assessment and approach, but it's worth pointing out that there's more to it than just "Trump fell into a fit of rage".