•  Vanth   ( @Vanth@reddthat.com ) 
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      233 months ago

      ☝️ recently got a covid test that based on all my research beforehand, it should have been covered except for $10 I would pay.

      Jokes on me, it actually cost me $200 they charged to my credit card two weeks later. I didn’t even get to know the price at the time I needed medical care.

      Sometimes other countries make fun of America for things they don’t understand. Not on this one, America deserves every bit of mocking it gets for it’s medical coverage atrocity.

      •  1984   ( @1984@lemmy.today ) 
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        3 months ago

        It’s a developing country. You will catch up.

        Also we guys in western Europe are happy we are not ruled by Russia or China, and that’s because of the USA I think.

        I kind of like the US culture, but it’s ridiculous how they treat human beings when money and power is on the line.

    • I’m in the middle of trying to get a fairly expensive surgery.

      If I had insurance, I would need to pay about $15,000 (between premiums, copays, annual deductible, coinsurance, and out of pocket maximums) with the only insurance available to me through my workplace before anything would be covered. So it’s not really worthwhile, right? Well, the surgery I need–around here–gets quotes of as much as $89,000. The most recent quote that I have is around $18,000. Keep in mind that the surgery takes about an hour, is a surgeon, one OR nurse assisting, and an anesthesiologist. The fee for the surgeon and nurse is about $5000, and the facility takes about $10,000. In the case of surgery in a hospital–rather than an ambulatory surgical center (ACS0—it’s even worse. With the same surgeon and OR nurse at an ACS, I had a quote of $16,300; at a hospital the quote was $49,000. The surgeon and nurse get the same fee regardless, which means that the hospital charged >$30,000.

      …And good fucking luck getting a lot of places to give you prices at all, even though DHHS has mandated pricing transparency. Even if you know exactly what CPT billing codes are going to be used, it can be days of back and forth before you can get a price. If you need shit fixed NOW, you’re just going to be stuck with whatever they charge.

    • Donziger’s story is heartbreaking and infuriating, and I’m continually disappointed that so few people are familiar with his story and what the courts did to him. It’s one of the clearest examples of judicial corruption and the power and benefits that are afforded to corporations and almost never extended to the people fighting for what’s right and just.

    • Yep, learned about this just yesterday from the YouTube channel BoyBoy who covered the situation quite well and had a lovely interview with Steven (as lovely as such a depressing topic can be)

  • Capitalists will say that it’s fine for an economy to have a few capitalists own all capital and all physical and intellectual property while common people are only allowed to rent it from the capitalists at whatever rate the capitalist pleases. However, capitalists will also say that the evil of socialism is that you won’t be allowed to own property. That’s the most capitalist thing I’m aware of.

    • Yep, that’s why Marx is correct. Capitalism consolidates itself into large monopolist syndicates, removing the usefulness of Capitalists and eliminating competition, whereby Central Planning of public property becomes greatly more efficient.

      The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

      -Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party

      For more reading, Why Public Property? is a good article elaborating in modern lingo.

    • Well yes, but also no. Meta fired those folks because they were using their lunch stipend provided by meta for things other than lunch. Petty, given how much they were paying the employees, but almost certainly a breach of contract on the employee’s part.

      Meta is probably trying to do layoffs without paying layoff costs or taking the stock hit layoffs can cause. Which is still capitalist AF by any measure, lol. For fans of watching what kind of shit the oligarchy is trying now, Meta is definitely one to keep an eye on. Mark Zuckerberg has been moving very conservative very quickly lately.

      •  Crotaro   ( @Crotaro@beehaw.org ) 
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        3 months ago

        You see, I at least buy food from my lunch stipend, although it’s usually my grocery trip and not necessarily my lunch of the day. And I only get about 7€ lunch stipend per day, not >40€.

  • A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an “artificial pancreas.” -eff.org

    We joke about someday having to jailbreak our own organs, but we’re basically already there.

    An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk. Then its maker refused repairs.

    Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will

    • I mean, it kind of makes some sense. Part of what they’re doing is checking your location, speed, bearing, etc., and–IIRC–using cell signals for some of that. That’s bandwidth, and someone has to pay for it, even if it’s not very much. OTOH, Helite makes a vest that uses a tether, and that’s going to work well enough in most cases.

      I think that there might be some that have options to pay for it all up-front instead of having a subscription, but I’m not positive; I just rely on leather and Knox inserts.

      •  Crozekiel   ( @Crozekiel@lemmy.zip ) 
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        3 months ago

        I don’t have any direct info on how it works, but I would have assumed it could be done completely offline with some sort of accelerometers. But I am a Lay Person so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

        • Accelerometers don’t work that great with motorcycles; when you go into a hard turn, the accelerometer still thinks that you’re straight up, due to centripedal force. You’d actually need gyroscopes. (…Which is why adaptive headlights for motorcycles end up being so expensive, and why only BMW specs them, and only on one or two touring models.)

    • Not sure about the modern equivalents to this, but in Rome (please correct if wrong) it used to be like that. Firefighters would only put out fires of houses that paid them and otherwise just stood there, watching.

      At least that’s what I read in one of those “did you know this about the ancient cultures?” articles and those aren’t always reliable either.

  •  RadDevon   ( @RadDevon@lemmy.zip ) 
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    113 months ago

    My brother used to work for an SEO company. They charged clients to have their web sites on directories which would improve their Google pagerank… until Google updated the algorithm to penalize sites listed in these directories. The company quickly pivoted to charging the same clients to have them removed from the directories they had just charged them to be listed in.

  • That person who was in a car that ended up crossing three lanes, hitting a pole and then hitting a tree. They declined an ambulance because they were scared of the ambulance bill - then got a bill for $150 for refusing the ambulance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯