What Dropping 17,000 Wallets Around The Globe Can Teach Us About Honesty -
If you’ve decided to investigate treatment options for your mental health, your health insurer will cheerfully refer you to a list of hundreds of providers – but as STAT’s Jack Turban discovered, this “network” of providers is actually a “ghost network,” filled with wrong numbers that ring in McDonald’s restaurants and jewelers. If you happen to reach an actual mental health professional, they’ll probably tell you they’re not accepting new patients.
An NIH study tried calling 360 in-network Blue Cross Blue Shield providers in Houston, Chicago, and Boston, with a 74% failure rate – that is, only 26% of those numbers rang in the office of a provider who would make an appointment. For pediatric psychiatrists, the failure rate rises to 83%.
Maybe that’s just a coincidence…but maybe not. A federal judge found that Unitedhealth was systematically, illegally gaming the system to deny mental health care to its insured customers in order to improve the company’s profitability.
It’s not hard to find a shrink who’ll see you – for $250/hour. But the for-profit health-care industry is signally uninterested in helping Americans take care of their mental health, and since people struggling with mental health issues are often easily discouraged (this is literally a symptom of depression), these hurdles are likely to be terrific money-spinners for the companies and their shareholders.
As Turban writes, “Imagine realizing (or acknowledging) that you have depression — a defining feature of which is loss of motivation — and start looking for a psychiatrist. After calling a McDonald’s, a jewelry store, and providers who say they don’t take your insurance but will be happy to see you for $250 per hour that you must pay out of pocket, you’ll likely be inclined to give up.”
…
(Source: Boing Boing)
Apple considering moving hardware production out of China -
(Source: Boing Boing, via merelygifted)
Black House
(via merelygifted)
(via leviathan-supersystem)
Two Horses, 1912, Franz Marc
Medium: oil,canvas
(via merelygifted)
graccus-babeuf-did-nothing-wrong:
[video]
(via horror-bmovie-punk-deactivated2)
Shut the barn door: UK data watchdog tells MPs mass slurping by firms is a huge risk to privacy -
Regulators and campaign groups have warned a UK Parliamentary inquiry that the increasing collection, use and storage of data by corporations poses a serious risk to privacy and security.
The Human Rights Committee hearing into the right to privacy and the “digital revolution” follows the scandal last year of 87 million unauthorised Facebook users’ details being shared with Cambridge Analytica.
In its submission, the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “The mass collection and aggregation of data, particularly by companies with data-driven business models, underpins the risks to individuals’ privacy at a very fundamental level.
“Businesses have always collected data on customers and users, but the rapid development of technology, particularly online, has allowed this collection and aggregation to be done on an industrial scale. It has reached the point where data collection is not simply a means to a business end, but the end in itself. Data has become the commodity.”
In April, the ICO fined commercial pregnancy and parenting “club” Bounty £400,000 for illegally sharing personal information belonging to more than 14 million people.
The company shared approximately 34.4 million records between June 2017 and April 2018 with credit reference and marketing agencies, including Acxiom, Equifax, Indicia and Sky. …
(Source: theregister.co.uk)
