#medicine for profit

[harvestheart]

medical care for profit

[hotcupoteckla]

United Healthcare CEO gets whacked, and the shills are talking about "Violence didn't solve anything! They're just going to hire another CEO."

BITCH, SHAREHOLDERS VOTE FOR THOSE - the C level board finds a bunch of candidates to promote and then

Sends a little notice to your fidelity account saying some bs like: "EMERGENCY VOTE! PICK OUR NEW CEO BY TUESDAY!!"

And then you go onto Fidelity or Vanguard or wherever and your stocks you own get counted as one vote for each share.

Here's the kicker. UHC might be having a firesale.

They're getting a lot of bad publicity right now.

Nobody liked the CEO nor the Ai they're being forced by the board to invest in.

So they're selling their shares.

So you can buy one.

For cheap.

And follow up on the funniest shit alive and break their shit.

You can buy .01 shares for the price of a coffee!

Gamestop those bitches!

[banji-effect]

This is one of the most horrifying things I've read lately, which unfortunately is truly saying something

When up and running, the bots based on Setzer featured bios and delivered automated messages to users such as: “Get out of my room, I’m talking to my AI girlfriend,” “his AI gf broke up with him,” and “help me.” The accounts and messages were reviewed by Fortune. ...“Our team discovered several chatbots on Character.AI’s platform displaying our client’s deceased son, Sewell Setzer III, in their profile pictures, attempting to imitate his personality and offering a call feature with a bot using his voice,” lawyers for Garcia said. ...It’s also not the first time chatbots based on the likeness of deceased young people have been hosted on the platform. Chatbots based on the British teenagers Molly Russell and Brianna Ghey have also been found on Character.ai’s platform, according to the BBC. Russell took her life after viewing suicide-related content online at the age of 14, while Ghey, 16, was murdered by two teenagers in 2023. A foundation set up in Molly Russell’s memory told the outlet in October, that the bots were “sickening” and an “utterly reprehensible failure of moderation.”

[bassproshopspyramid]

image ID: the destiel breaking news meme, but after cas says "i love you", dean replies:

cas, danaher corporation and it’s subsidiary company cepheid are still charging tuberculosis (TB) patients in low- and middle-income countries $10–$20 to access quick and accurate testing despite the fact that cepheid’s genexpert machine tests were developed with at least $252 million in taxpayer money and doctors without borders found out that the tests only cost $3–$4.50 to produce. TB is a major cause of death and disability, not to mention that the inaccessibility of these tests leads to the spread of drug resistant TB around the globe.

it’s #timefor5. find out how you can help at tbfighters.org

[victusinveritas]

UnitedHealth CEO meets same fate as many of his clients

The scofflaw company has been sued multiple times in just the past couple years.

[from the substack of Carl Beijer ]

Dec 04, 2024

Today New York City saw its twelfth shooting in 2024. You probably didn’t know this was shooting number twelve because these incidents are rarely national news. But this time around the victim was extremely rich, which means we’re all going to be hearing about this for a good news cycle or two.

-- I love that the shooter escaped on an e-bike. Hope they remain at large.

[one-in-a-million-fishsticks]

Y'know how Edward Cullen has a metric fuck-ton of high-school degrees?

Well, I'm pretty sure that it would be perfectly in character if Adrian Tepes had a similarly sized collection of college degrees.

Thanks to Dracula, our boy is sitting on more generational wealth than he probably knows what to do with, and since his appearance is that of an eternally twenty-something, he'd fit right in with the sleep-deprived academic masses. He likes accruing knowledge, and I can think of no better way than re-attending college every other decade or so for him to stay up to date on current worldly affairs and discoveries.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[fancydusk]

The smiley!

I've only been able to draw this and work on the second page of the mini comic because I updated Ibis Paint and it wouldn't let me paint, and then I said, Screw it and installed the previous version that DOES let me draw, at the cost of a ton of processes, brushes, and the second page of the WIP. I want to do so many drawings, and I don't have a shitload of time because my teachers don't know the concept of a break (I think we're a little behind on the first period but meh) Not much has happened, I just feel like a lot has happened, but eh, well, life goes on, unfortunately, so we have to endure.

A very long winded way of saying "Hey, I'm not dead yet, take a drawing of my new character that I want to wrap in a blanket and hide from the world (Starscream is still number 1, but Swerve quickly rose to share positions with Screamer)" don't you think?

[nateconnolly]

In 2023, the top three largest health insurance companies all earned higher net income than they had in 2022. CVS Health’s net profits rose by 4 billion dollars, a 93% increase. That same year, the average premium increased by 7%.

These numbers are not only information about money — they tell a story of blood, bone, and rot.

They also tell a story of vacations, boats, and vintage wine. 

[criminally-unserious-looplu]

If there are any other UK artists here then

Basically sleazy companies are trying to change UK copy right laws to allow scraping of A.I. with permission and to be able to against artists' copy writes

You find your MP and representives by googling

PLEASE TRY

[spacedocmom]

Doctor Beverly Crusher @SpaceDocMom There can never be quality health care in any system that lets economic forces dictate care, be it for-profit care that pushes for what's profitable or underfunded care that allows insufficient care. You will all keep suffering until the money comes out of care entirely. emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked 12:47 PM · Oct 1, 2023

[hafwen]

Love that insurance companies get to say, “Hey we know your doctor has been prescribing you this exact med at this dose for over 5 years but have you considered trying the med that didn’t work again? It’s much better for our bottom line.”

[i-spilled-my-soup]

the confusion of the staff of asklepios and the caduceus of hermes. asklepios who reigns over medicine and healing. hermes who reigns over trickery and commerce. asklepios who resurrected the dead. hermes who guides the dead to the underworld

[funhomo]

thinking apropos of nothing about the time a couple years ago that my mother had to get all new doctors because united healthcare “failed to negotiate” with the system the doctors she’d been seeing for years were in

my mom is a medical doctor. she is in private practice which means since The Divorce she basically gets to scroll through all the same shitty exchange options as every other self employed schmuck.

my mother sure did get into a spiral about “I AM A PHYSICIAN AND I CANT EVEN GET DECENT HEALTHCARE MYSELF”

also? it didn’t used to be like this. part of why the state of health care makes my mom so angry is that it’s gotten worse over the decades.

Prior authorization? What they call “managed care”? the whole insurers-practicing-medicine-without-a-license thing? Wasn’t a thing til the 80s or so. Back In The DayTM if a doctor prescribed something your insurance paid for it. Or so I’m told.

[bassproshopspyramid]

‼️⚠️ 🎉 GOOD NEWS (nov. 15 / 2023)

[image ID: the destiel confession meme. cas says "I love you.

dean replies: "the endTB clinical trial found 3 new all-oral drug regiments with similar efficacy and safety to current conventional treatments while reducing the treatment time by up to two-thirds. they will allow for more individualized treatment centred on patients. and for the first time in the care of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, these treatments can be used in nearly all cases of MDR-TB, including in children, adolescents, adults, and pregnant people."

end ID.]

multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is a form of tuberculosis that is particularly difficult to treat due to resistance to the 2 most powerful firstline antibiotics. many people are still treated with conventional treatments that are long (up to 24 months), ineffective, and often cause terrible side effects.

every year, there are about 500,000 new cases of MDR-TB worldwide - but only a tiny fraction are successfully treated. the endTB trial, led by MSF (médecins sans frontières/doctors without borders), PIH (partners in health) and IRD (interactive research and development), funded by Unitaid, and featuring 754 participants in 7 countries is a randomized, controlled trial designed to provide high-quality evidence on new, all-oral, shortened drug regimens.

one of the new regimens was found to be even more effective than current conventional treatments. the new trial also added an additional 4th regimen as an alternative for people who can’t tolerate some TB drugs.

there are now — for the first time ever! — 5 all-oral regimens that are effective against MDR-TB in 9 months or less and which are as good or better than a contemporary standard-of-care control. if recommended by WHO, they can be used in nearly all cases of MDR-TB, including children, adolescents, adults, and pregnant people, a first in MDR-TB care. two of the non-inferior regimens cost under $400, and a third costs under $600, for the full course of treatment.

EDIT: press release from endTB for a source

[thesaltyoncologist]

What I love about my job: my patients and partners

What do I hate about my job: the never-ending paperwork required to justify to an insurance company:

1) they should actually pay for their clients healthcare needs , and

2) that I deserve to be paid for the services I provide.

Let’s get this straight. Physician wages and reimbursement are a gigantic drop in the bucket of the cost of medical care in the US. The insurance companies and their pocket padding practices are the problem.

[ksenka-zarazka]

signed up for adhd evaluation today and my appointment is 4 months away. yeah i want ukraine to be in eu but not like this wtf😭 let me survive first

jokes aside, i’m not really surprised because in november i wanted to start a “general” therapy (like i’m not going to ghost the therapist ever again) with a ukrainian doctor online — 2,5 months’ worth of wait. keep in mind, this is not a free therapy (god bless the people who do that sort of voluntary work), it costs a pretty penny. but this constant obstacle to find the right specialist that fits you just made me clench my teeth and move on.

due to war the demand to find comfort within your mental health has risen astronomically and the lack of professionals that you could feel pre-invasion is now emphasized more than ever.