It’s good to see someone trying to raise the level of political discourse here on the SDMB…
My bad.
Don’t feel bad. This guy is pure entertainment. He’s either trolling for attention or a class a fruitcake. But he’s not someone to take seriously except for the danger his mind set presents. I’m hoping for the first option because its hard to believe someone could be such a nutbag in real life.
WTF, dumbass? I asked you how you’d handle your kids asking you how babies were made – back when you were talking about how sex-ed turned you into an eight-year-old sexual predator.
God, is stupidity a progressive condition?
Here is a nice story of death panels. Except it is a computer death panel. Wellpoint has an algorithm that as soon as a customer of theirs has breast cancer ,automatically the fraud unit is alerted. Then they work very hard trying to find an excuse to drop them. They will do anything they can to accuse them providing an excuse to not pay for coverage. The patients are all up to date on their policies but Wellpoint does not want to pay. Just let the women die. As long as it does not cost them money.
Sorry, that doesn’t count because it’s not a government entity. Only governments do bad things. Corporations are automatically altruistic, and if a corporation does anything wrong it’s actually the government’s fault somehow.
Now, now, that’s actually not accurate. Nobody ever really says corporations are altruistic. In fact, the cult of the invisible hand believe it’s in everyone’s best interest to be as selfish as possible, with the idea that if the company and the consumer are equally selfish, the scales will balance out in the end.
If this story checks out, and I think it likely, its totally beyond the pale. I can sorta see double checking AIDS patients, sorta if I squint, I can see that the most common ways of AIDS infection might involve risks or behaviors that might, at the furthest stretch of a reasoning mind, might be relevant to qualifying for insurance. Failure to disclose to the prospective insurer that you are an intravenous drug user, for instance.
But there is no such hidey-hole when it comes to breast cancer, there is no rational cause to assume that such patients are any more likely than those selected at random to be fraudulent or caused by patient behavior.
This is probably not technically illegal. Yuck.
What would be funny is if all the customers of WellPoint discover that they were paying for insurance that wasn’t really insurance after all and they demanded that they return all the premiums they paid.
I’m betting the technical legal term for that is “being shit out of luck”.
Two pillars of conservative thought:
- Personal responsibility;
- Corporations are people.
It’s hard to see how conservatives can defend this kind of thing- they love to bash individuals who chose to work for a company that went out of business, or were born with a pre-existing condition, and say that those people should take personal responsibility for their poor decisions, but apparently Wellpoint doesn’t have to take personal responsibility for the poor decision of selling insurance to someone who was going to get cancer down the road. Not that conservative thought (sic) has to make any kind of sense.
Side note, I doubt I will ever be able to pull the lever for Evan Bayh again (I know he’s retiring from the Senate but it seems like a pretty safe bet that he is going to run for governor again), seeing as how his wife is on the board of directors of this scumbag company and he is therefore profiting mightily from this kind of bullshit. I remember back when he was going on TV and saying he might not vote for cloture on healthcare reform, which caused Wellpoint stock to go up. I’d love to know how much his personal net worth increased just by making those statements on TV.
You could say the same thing about certain cancers due to unhealthy and risk-identified lifestyle choices, as well as diseases and conditions related to obesity.
Jerome Mitchell’s winning a $10 million suit (reduced from $15 million) says at least one court thought what they did was illegal.
But I do not want to derail this bullet train of funny.
Well, since you were kind enough to ask…
I have no wish to make a comprehensive list, but perhaps a few items by way of example. We could start with the righteous imbecility that is the OP, wherein you manage to prove exactly the opposite of what you intended, indeed the opposite of what you thought you were proving. Which even you sorta, kinda acknowledge in Post 97.
Then after the usual anecdotal goalpost shifting to excuse your stupidity, we get to http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12335344&postcount=121"]Post 121 wherein you reveal yourself to be a perv— ah, a sadly damaged child. What a hoot that one is!
Your revelations spin along with much attendant hilarity, culminating with you telling us that “people weren’t so hysterical about youthful sex” in those halcyon days you so pine for, in http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12338847&postcount=216"]Post 216.
Then you come out with this beauty, which really isn’t funny at all in http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12346234&postcount=355"]Post 355
And you repeat this, with emphasis, saying in http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12347083&postcount=393"]Post 393
Forty five thousand people a year, dimwit. Mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, daughters, sons, cousins, friends, neighbors— PEOPLE, all having survivors whose lives are turned upside down, most of them additionally having to endure bankruptcy, their hopes and dreams dashed, all those lives wasted because they couldn’t get insurance, you disgusting piece of sanctimonious shit. You waving away a death toll approaching in a single year the entire American servicemen’s toll in Viet Nam, or a number nearly 15 times as great as the dead of September 11th, is beyond even your own usual cretinism.
I wanted to pit you for this disgusting display of inhumanity, but I decided I had better things to do than to bother. Other people already know you for what you are; my pointing it out isn’t necessary.
After this nadir of rational thought, you launch into an amazing display of mathematical stupidity in calculating the related percentage. Cite not included but it is between the two above.
Since you mention classism, we might start with the amazing “Let them mow lawns!!” drivel that you repeat in several posts. Then there’s this gem, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12356698&postcount=523"]Post 523
And in http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12356823&postcount=526"]Post 526
As for sexist and perhaps racist (although I used the term “bigoted” before) we have this ‘little honey’ (pun only tangentially intended), straight from the misogynist ethos of centuries past in http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12359785&postcount=580"]Post 580
All this on merely a quick run through the present thread.
I used to think you were that special kind of troll called an attention whore. You post truly outrageous things, defend them by the most specious of devices, and generally piss off reasonable posters who attempt to engage you in dialog. Clearly you are either dumber than a hod of bricks, or you do a superb job of simulating abject stupidity. Truly, facts do not sway you in light of your own higher truth, a characteristic of zealots and/or unthinking morons. There is no other explanation for the phenomenon that is you. But you are capable of having actual conversations even with people you’ve otherwise alienated, as long as you stick to non-political subjects like music. So I’ve always treated your political commentary as entertainment rather than debate, good for a bit of snark but not worthy of actual discussion. You were a sometimes amusing, sometimes aggravating, rather petty and ultimately inconsequential little insect.
Until this thread.
My opinion of you, already rather low, has taken a nose dive into such depths of depravity and unflinching inhumanity as you have here revealed about yourself.
I await your inevitable “deconstruction”. I can only hope that it is entertaining, because it certainly won’t be substantive.
Yeah. Plus, suing the government is impossible, even though it’s the only way anyone Starkers knows has ever gotten disability benefits or whatever the heck that was twelve or thirteen pages ago. But suing a corporation is easy’n’fun!
Besides, they should have thought of that before they let themselves be born women.
(We interrupt this thread to bring you this important Public Service Announcement! Men can get breast cancer, too. And although they get it much less often than women, when they do, they tend to get the more aggressive types. So guys, please don’t just assume you’re immune, okay?)
What would be REALLY funny is if all the paying customers realized Wellpoint was a shitty company and choose a different insurer. It really sucks that there is only one company and everyone has to use them. If the government allowed competition, you could choose from dozens of shitty insurers, and choose one that denies things you don’t have.
The way customers realized Nike was using slave labour, stopped buying their product, and drove them out of business encouraging all the other sneaker companies to improve their employment and sourcing standards.
As Ann Coulter would say, “let’s see how Toyota is going in 6 months.”
Most insurance is provided through employment. The average person never is in position to pick and choose his carrier. They only find out how bad they are when they or a family member gets sick. Then it is too late.
Insurance companies declared autism is not an illness. Why? Because they did not want to pay for treatment. They saved billions. They knew it was a brain disorder . They knew the care was on going. They just did not want to pay for it. It was a dishonest move to save money and screw over their customers. Now 11 states have forced the carriers to pay for care. They have been as a result of patients banding and working to get legislation passed. So there are still 39 states where the insurance company has abandoned their customers in a time of need. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy for them doesn’t it?
I see what you did there.
I was under the impression that most employment based insurance is a group plan, and that under group plans individuals aren’t dropped, and individual policies aren’t denied. Is that incorrect?
Was the Wellpoint case involving group plans or individual ones?
And if insurance is through an employer, couldn’t employers choose to switch providers?
I ask this predominantly because the US system is complicated and I’m struggling to understand it. And also because it looks like you’re pulling from two separate situations: 1. private insurance where people can be dropped by also get to choose other providers vs 2. employer based providers without choice but can’t be dropped. It seems disingenuous to pull the negative from 1 and match it with the negative from 2.
If we are still following Robert’s Rules of Order I would like to call for a Point of Information. All debate shall stop until the point is clarified. 
You are in fact much brighter than your name implies.
If you follow that link (titled Wellpoint Lobbyists Axed Key Protections for Breast Cancer Patients From Health Care Bill) to their source you get this article.
Comment of note: “During the recent legislative process for the reform law, however, lobbyists for WellPoint and other top insurance companies successfully fought proposed provisions of the legislation. In particular, they complained about rules that would have made it more difficult for the companies to fairly – or unfairly – cancel policyholders.”
To allow that rule would subject insurance companies to repeated fraud. So to solve the problem of insurance companies unfairly dropping clients, we have allowed clients to unfairly demand claims. Does that seem like a valid solution?
Also note: “A WellPoint spokeswoman on Thursday denied such lobbying took place.” Whether or not you trust that spokeswoman over the Huffingtonpost is entirely up to you.
It should also be noted that the Huffingtonpost article about Wellpoint in my opinion deceptively slid the in the point about dropping AIDS patients, without clarifying that it was Fortis, now known as Assurant Health. Might as well slip a comment about dog fighting into the OJ Simpson trial.
Can you explain this please? How are they subject to repeated fraud? I’m not seeing it.