I'm not about to say that this is good, but I have no sympathy here. The fact that this company exists is a major failing of our society. $1.18 billion in revenue 2019 alone.
yeah the fact that this company exists and is making a lot of money doing it and likely has an undue influence in how our laws are made makes me shed not a single tear.
I am only waiting to see if they have backups for their data; if they do i will shed one.
> yeah the fact that this company exists and is making a lot of money doing it and likely has an undue influence in how our laws are made makes me shed not a single tear.
I don’t think so. There is a huge undercurrent of government is bad in the US that can be seen in the voting records of the population, and I believe it’s a fundamental issue of people being tribal and not wanting “their” tribe’s resources to benefit another’s tribe.
That undercurrent of "government is bad" doesn't come from nowhere. It comes largely from Fox News, which has advertisers that benefit from this message. It comes from our politicians who accept bribes to drive legislation. It comes from a general distrust of the government because of mismanagement.
There is an anarchistic streak that has run through the US since before it was founded. Partly due to the realities of life on the ever-moving frontier which defined a large portion of the country's history, partly from the political pressures which caused many to emigrate in the first place, partly from fighting a bloody war for independence against an overbearing government. Mistrust of government has always been a defining feature of American politics.
Government may be bad, but private businesses are not accountable in the same way as an elected representative. It's the accountability I want. Can we expect to see any judicial recourse for this gross criminal negligence here?
> That undercurrent of "government is bad" doesn't come from nowhere. It comes largely from Fox News
It's reinforced by Fox News, but it's got far deeper roots. The current US political strain ascended with people like Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman in the 60s (but has even older antecedents), culminating in Reagan and the modern Republican party in the 80s/90s. Fox News was founded 1996, and the closely-related right-wing talk radio universe only got its start about a decade earlier, I think.
The history goes farther back than the Civil War, and I don’t see strong evidence that it’s always racial in its origins.
A lot of immigrants, both recent and historical, came to the USA because they didn’t like the government in their home country, Pilgrims as a key example, Falun Gong members leaving China as a more recent example.
The general distrust of a strong government is still part of American culture.
American politics has always been this way. It's simplistic to blame it all on Faux News, or the Civil War or a vague over generalized "racism." The paranoid style even predates the American Revolutionary War. You can draw a straight line from the anti-Mason and anti-Catholic populist movements from the 1800's to QAnon amd Antifa today. It's the exact same narrative, paranoid about vast and powerdul malevolent conspiracies being run by a cabal of the most powerful. The coup plotters names and methods of attack may change, but the structural narrative remains the same.
The Paranoid style it's in our blood, it's a unique trait that defines us as Americans. Therefore I don't knock it and I hope we never lose it.
I assume you are aware it is hospitals and medical practices that are out the money when people don't pay? Why blame the company doing the collecting on their behalf
This could not have happened to a more deserving company. I take no comfort in this happening to them, yet I have no sympathy for a company who preys on people at their most vulnerable moment. Judge away!
Man, I wish I could be saddened by this news but the tears just aren't coming.
A business built on extracting money from the poor and sick? I guess sometimes bad things happen to bad people. Socialized medicine can't come soon enough.
> The company has access to a wealth of personal, financial and medical information on tens of millions of patients, including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, billing information and medical diagnostic data.
If the threat actors choose to release the data, then you may be doxed
Hey maybe this is one those where the encryption part of the code is messed up because some script kiddy copy pasted code and decryption is impossible...
Damn, it must be so hard for them, having some evil organization demand a huge payment for something bad that happened to them that wasn't their fault.
I doubt it would make much of a difference. Medical billing is from the service provider not wanting/able to wait for the bill and wanting payment "now" so they take a sharp haircut. The ammount they can sell it for depends upon what they can recoup on average. Sometimes it if they waited one more week the seller would have gotten 100% instead of say 35%. Other times the delinquient debt is already worth nothing as the patient turns out to be a dead homeless person - lump it into the averages and move on.
Looking at it in an abstracted way the incompetence of the end user doesn't devalue the base product beyond the loss of them as a customer in the market. That a batch became 0% recoverable because of a screw up says nothing of the collection rate of the provider any more than the fact refrigerated food rots if left unrefrigerated for 24 hours.
