Idk about others’ experiences here, but I have found negotiating BCBS’ labyrinth of phone menus and clueless, disinterested “customer service” reps to be every bit as byzantine as any dealings I’ve had with SSA or IRS. I have found no discernible difference. At least I get the feeling, even if it’s imaginary, that I have some power to help solve the latter every four years with my vote.
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Wat? Last I checked, numerous studies show the VA does a much better job than private hospitals.
I totally agree and have had similar experiences. I think the big takeaway from the last 40 years of the intentional corrosion of our institutions is that transparency is very important. Much more important than keeping the governments secrets.
I know it annoys skydiver because she knows that technical specs are the majority of the classified stuff out there (and she’s probably right about that) but I think we should blow up all the secrecy laws and force the government to be 10,000,000% more transparent.
The problem here is that people (in many cases justifiably) don’t trust the government. I think the best way to deal with that would be to put 99.999% of what the government does on the internet for everyone to see.
You really have to stop swallowing military stats whole dude. What part of they aren’t real don’t you get exactly?
The Walter Reed scandal was only 5 years ago, and from what I’ve read nothing has changed. Wait times for people to see doctors stretch out months… and to say they’ve failed completely on mental health is a massive understatement.
To be clear I’m not defending private hospitals on any of this stuff, those studies were made a lot easier by private healthcare being so woefully shitty. They are spectacular messes as well.
Doesn’t change the VA’s well deserved reputation for being a bureaucratic dystopian hellscape.
Also please remember I’m the biggest single booster for single payer healthcare on this whole forum. But I can also call the government out on its own bullshit and still be a liberal. I personally think the first side to get its shit together is going to win the whole thing. There’s plenty to not like about government, and we need to be actively trying to figure out how to make it much more efficient.
Would you believe the RAND Corporation? They’re not exactly in the tank for single payer:
The government would be 1000000x better if shit was just quicker and they used common sense for a lot of stuff. I was sick as an infant and lost a lot of my hearing. All you need to do is look at an audiogram and a doctor would say “Anything below that line is bad,” and you would know I have bad hearing.
Because of my hearing loss, I can get Medicare. I didn’t know this until I was 30 years old. My mom didn’t have health insurance and no one told her I would qualify for Medicare. She died when I was 25 so she never knew I could have had it to begin with. She also would have been able to name me as a dependent and get money from SS to pay my bills. Again, no one told her so it never crossed anyone’s mind.
When I found out I could qualify, I had to hire a lawyer. I had to go to 3 doctors to confirm I had hearing loss. That entire process took 8 months. Then after I was approved, there was a 5 month waiting period. So even that took 13 months before I finally had health insurance.
Even though I’ve had hearing loss since being an infant, I still need to have my hearing tested every 5-7 years to see if my hearing has improved. (Narrator: His hearing did not improve and it never will.) And every single step along the way between making an appointment, seeing the receptionist, nurse, doctor, audiologist, etc. all agree it’s entirely pointless.
Oh and tax payers pay for all this. Thanks guys! I figure over the course of the past 15 years it’s probably cost $100K easy. Instead of you know, one test that shows my hearing loss on an audiogram.
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It’s right there on the front page of the study that it doesn’t address the big problem in the va system which is speed of access. And no I don’t trust the rand corporation lol. I trust basically no one. To trust a study I pretty much have to read it cover to cover. I’ve been burned too many times by academics, politicians, government agencies, and obviously interest groups.
The shittiest thing about being good at reading these kinds of things is how quickly you realize that the vast majority of them are fatally biased because funding.
Well, of course if you take the military as a proxy for the entire government, you’re going to think the entire government sucks.
This conversation is too high-content for this thread imo.
To get us back on track with a Fuck Amazon story, on Cyber Monday I bought a computer on Amazon (nothing special, advertised as $350 and I got it for $300, but seemed like a really good deal for the specs). It still hasn’t shown up, so I checked in the app and saw “this item is likely lost or stolen, you can request a refund or replacement,” so I reached out to customer service. They informed me that they could refund it (which they did) but could not replace it. The computer was now only being offered by third-party sellers: for $390 as a refurbished and $540 new. One customer service agent offered me a $90 gift card credit to cover the difference between what I originally purchased and the refurbished one, but I kept pushing–I wanted the computer I bought, new, for the price I bought it at.
Finally I got to the highest level of customer service (I asked if I could speak to his manager and he told me his only bosses were administrative/operations people). He told me they couldn’t give me a $240 credit to buy a new one since that was sold by a third-party and, I quote, “Amazon doesn’t do price-matching.” I don’t know why the $90 was allowed, but since it appeared to be $90 or nothing, I took the $90. Now I have an extra $90 in Amazon gift card, which I guess is nice, but I just wanted the damn computer.
After doing further research, I suspect it was a mistake price on their part–this computer (same brand, as close to the exact specs as I can get) seems to retail around $550 at other places, like Best Buy, and not the $350 that was shown as the original advertised price–a $350 version on comparable websites appears to be spec’d down a bit. Additionally, UPS never registered receipt of the item, so it’s not like it got lost in transit–it never made it from a warehouse to UPS. My theory is that they fucked up and decided to just not fulfill the order rather than eat $250 in mistake-discount.
Fuck you, Jeff.
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Yeah, this brings up a good point. I think a good, effective response to the “government” sucks, let’s privatize everything crowd is to say, “yes, because letting Comcast overhaul the DMV would really improve the situation.”
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The issue is that large organizations tend to be very inefficient. It’s because they are big, not because they are government or private. They also tend to be very hard to make changes with.
Honestly I think we need to figure out how to flatten everything as much as possible. I can say with a significant degree of confidence that having a more cellular structure where every office operates independently (with metrics to hit) works quite a bit better than a top down command and control model.
The military in particular is just way too fucking big. It needs to be like 20% of its current size tops.
Yeah I keep wondering where people are supposedly having amazing customer service experiences with huge private companies
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There’s a very good history of the British involvement there just called “Unwinnable” - which obviously heavily involves the US forces as well. Can’t get past the paywall for the Post, but I’m sure it’s true. I’m also equally sure that it should be journalistic malpractice to need some new source of documents and just be saying so now.
Sounds like the problem has more to do with means (or qualification) testing than with health care.
Not directed at you, but at the pro-means testers: how regularly will people have to prove they are poor?
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Supposedly this account has been reported hundreds of times, but it’s still proudly tweeting this garbage.
https://twitter.com/elizabe98102291/status/1203915936341712896
So when you get a hearing test, there are 2 basic parts. If you fail the first part, the 2nd part is not necessary b/c you will fail that part as well. When I was younger, I would always fail the first part and they wouldn’t make me take the 2nd part. But now that I’m on Medicare, they always make me take the 2nd part even though I will fail. I assume it’s to rack up charges. Bunch of bullshit if you ask me.
I see this stuff as an extension of long-standing ideas of “strength” and masculinity that seem to be pervasive throughout the military. These people all think pulling out or admitting that the endeavor is hopeless is some massive display of weakness and if we show weakness, that will be the end of the world. In my view it’s just as toxic of a belief in our military as it is in our concept of masculinity.
There are like dozens of studies out there that reach the same conclusions, if you’re just gonna say “FAKE NEWS” idk what to tell you.
The #1 reason govt isn’t as effective as it should be is that we keep putting Republicans in charge who put private-industry fraudsters like Betsy DeVoss in charge of public services. All this “government can’t do anything right!” is just right-wing starve-the-beast bullshit.
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I though this story was going to end with the little girl having to fill out complicated forms, having substantial taxes withheld from her pay, and the job site foreman being jailed for violating child labor laws.
If fact, with a different punchline it could be a viral conservative meme attacking onerous regulations instead of a hilarious joke!
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I don’t want to starve the government… I want the government to deploy its resources in the sanest way possible going after the lowest hanging fruit available. One of the best ways for us to win is to make government as popular as possible. The best way to do that is to improve it continuously.
Waste is a real thing that gets Republicans elected… which might be why they take every possible opportunity to make it worse.