A breast cancer surgeon had to “scrub out mid-surgery” to call a UnitedHealthcare representative because the insurance giant questioned whether the procedure she was in the middle of performing was really necessary.
Dr. Elisabeth Potter posted her story to Instagram this week, and the post has gotten more than 221,000 likes.
Still wearing her scrub cap, Dr. Potter began her video saying, “It’s 2025, and navigating insurance has somehow just gotten worse.”
We need to make it a crime to deny claims on necessary healthcare. 10x penalty (paid to the victim directly) for denial. 30x if they were denied using AI or an automated system.
Police recovered bullets at the scene that read, "delay, deny, defend
Depose. Say it, DEPOSE.
I can understand this one instance being an editorial slip-up, but I’ve seen way too many news articles that reference the bullets while omitting that one particular word - depose.
It’s the word that scares the oligarchs the most. Which is all the more reason for us to repeat it, even if journalists won’t. DELAY, DENY, DEPOSE.
Dude, you got the words wrong too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Mangione (See “Alleged Role …”.)
In your defense, the cops initially reported the words from the bullet casings incorrectly before later making a correction. And half the media has been confused about it ever since.
Good catch! Thank you, I fixed my comment.
Cigna has this cool new thing they do where, after they deny a medication for our son, they have a nurse call us and tell us why our doctor was wrong to prescribe it in the first place. You know, because a nurse who has never been in the same room as my son knows more than the fucking doctor who examined him.
What a sick gif…
Can’t go wrong with Hitchcock.
Well, you assholes voted in trump and the republican cabal so dont expect any change soon.
Yeah, it’s hilarious. Most of the surgeons I work with voted for Trump…
I sure wish someone would do something about this.
We need a hero. Someone who will do whatever it takes even sacrifice themselves if necessary to proclaim, “this is not okay. You will not get away with this.”
Someone call user4616250
deleted by creator
Mama mia!
Nah, we need to realize this isn’t on any one person’s shoulders but on everybody and start a mass movement.
I’ve been hearing for decades that the 2nd amendment is fundamental to the American identity, because it’s supposed to be an insurance against this type of tyranny against the American people. There you have your mass movement, making claims on that insurance, using what’s purported to be fundamental to the national identity of the country. What tyranny is the 2nd amendment protecting against if this doesn’t make the cut?
It’s really hard to disagree with Luigi when he wrote “evidently, I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty”. Brutal honesty is what this state of affairs calls for. It’s time to water Jefferson’s proverbial tree of liberty.
Mass movements always exist, you just have to join them.
But mass movements also demand a lot of your time and energy, which you may not have if you’re staring down the barrel of multiple major medical procedures. What’s more, they demand a political system receptive to their demands.
The appeal of stocastic violence is that it doesn’t require an enormous long term collaborative good faith effort. It just requires a few vigilantes with more rage than sense.
After decades of campaigning on health care reform (literally straight back to the 1940s) and posting a ton of Ls (particularly since Carter and the neoliberal turn), Luigi might not be transformative but he’s cathartic.
A mass movement of bannable and actionable suggestions
Nope, y’all don’t need (or deserve tbh, speaking as someone not from the US) a hero. You should try to hold your own government accountable for once; the last time that happened was the Civil Rights Movement I think?
Then the FBI shot MLK.
Doctors across the country need to adopt a “just fucking do it” attitude, and tell their legal departments to fuck off.
On this and other topics.
The problem with that is that they care about their patients, and it’s their patients who will suffer the most when the insurance company tells them both to fuck themselves.
The problem is not billing the company when the patient needs healthcare, regardless of what the company insists they will or won’t cover.
Don’t tell me ‘well they can’t just charge insurers whatever whenever’ when they have no fucking issue billing patients obscene amounts months after the fact.
Proud to say as of the first of the year I’m no longer insured with these dirtbags.
I’m now insured with some other dirtbags.
Some dirt bags are slightly less bad than other dirtbags. That’s why I have Comcast Internet.
Who could possibly be worse than comcast.
Hughesnet.
cox communications.
Their name is literally pronounced “cocks”. It really says it all
Small regional providers. Ever heard of Wow! Internet? I assure you they are terrible.
Wow was cheap and fast for me… And would go down for 3 days at a time inexplicably. Oh, and they sent me a modem-router combo with cascade routers disabled and a firmware flash that prevented me from changing it, evnthough I specifically requested (and paid for) modem only.
In my experience Wow! is less scummy that Comcast, but also less reliable. Overall it is probably a wash.
Wow was the answer I was expecting too lol
Or Frontier
Cincinnati Bell was actually half decent.
It’s the inverse of “the grass is always greener”. The internet service is always shittier.
I’m curious as well. I haven’t met worse.
A complete lack of internet would be worse than Comcast, but it’s honestly a pretty close thing.
Can’t speak any the companies in the south or on the coasts but Comcast is easily one of the best residential Internet providers in the Midwest.
I’m not fan of Comcast but I dealt with pretty much every provider out there when I was an integrator (IT and AV for rich people) and it’s not even close.
Let that sink in…that’s how shitty the other ISPs are.
Sad to say, my company was bought by another, and i am forced to change to these dirt bags. I currently have a malady that will require surgery. Not that it matters, the old company declined my last surgery anyway and i paid out of pocket
My partner had this same thing happen. She needed a neurosurgery to install a nerve stimulator in her neck. Her insurance approved a surgery to implant a test device, but then when it was determined it did solve her issues, denied the surgery for the permanent stimulator, forcing her neurosurgeon to write to them to get it approved. Then, during the surgery, they sent another denial. Fortunately, U of M is fantastic, and their hospital just covered the cost of the surgery due to the level of bullshit the insurance company pulled. Otherwise she would have ended up with multiple scars on her head and neck, and nothing to show for it, other than continuing nerve pain.
Calling it now:
UHC will deny the anesthesia claim because they wont understand why they needed so much time to perform the procedure.
There are doctors and providers who just don’t take UHC because they are such a pain in the ass to deal with.
UHC has an enormous client pool, though. Their business model involves lots of kickbacks to HR/Execs and tons of money on marketing, as well as regulatory capture and consolidation/cartelization of competitors.
“Well, I simply won’t do business with you” isn’t a practical option for most hospitals, particularly in the ER or other time sensitive setting.
I could be wrong, but I believe ER visits are handled differently?
It only speaks to how bad UHC is that even though their business model is marketing and kickbacks, there are still providers who don’t want to have anything to do with them.
There was one single doctor in a fifty mile radius who would deliver my youngest because UHC. Had there been zero, we could’ve gone to anyone and they’d have had to cover it, but because there was one provider, we had to use him.
It reminds me of enshittification, in that the end product involves both regular people and businesses customers being fucked over (but the regular people are fucked over worse/for long). In this analogy, the doctors are the business customers. Enshittification doesn’t apply here though, because this system has always been shitty for everyone, even if it’s getting worse. If this scenario “rhymes” with enshittification, it’s just because they both are based on capitalism being toxic
Well, if enshittification is understood as “making it more shitty” rather than “turning it into shit”, then it’s perfectly possible to further enshittify that which is already shit.
Personally I favour the latter definition since otherwise we would need another word for “making a shitty thing even worse”.
Yeah, I do agree with you. However I do like Doctorow’s pithy, 3 step formulation, which lends itself to the stricter definition. But he does also say that he may have coined it, but it’s not his word, so go nuts
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“Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. […] But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.” [1]
1 ↩︎
Yeah, it does make sense that if Enshittification is being used as the name of a process, it’s interpreted as a state transition - hence from non-shit to shit - rather than an increase of something.
Ultimatelly this is such a new word that, IMHO, we don’t really know how people will end up be using it in general.
I hope the surgeon said, at least, “Even if you conclude against my advice that it wasn’t necessary based on your data before this call, it is most definitely necessary now, as the patient is open on my operating table at this moment.” <slam>.
The Adjuster has entered the chat.
