News @lemmy.world realcaseyrollins @thelemmy.club 2 mo. ago

Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People’s Medicaid Benefits

gizmodo.com Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People’s Medicaid Benefits

Thousands of children and adults were automatically terminated from Medicaid and disability benefits programs by a computer system that was supposed to make applying for and receiving health coverage easier.

Technology @lemmy.world Wilshire @lemmy.world 2 mo. ago

gizmodo.com /judge-rules-400-million-algorithmic-system-illegally-denied-thousands-of-peoples-medicaid-benefits-2000492529

38 comments

“Oopsie! Hope we can afford the 2 million dollar fine!”
- I wish the law got rewritten for companies so that it's more of revenue + assets of the top level execs personally + the company as well. I know it isn't going to happen, but I could dream.
  
  Honestly executives and board members who receive performance bonuses and golden parachutes should carry extra liability, such that these perks can be denied or even clawed back (and used to help the damages) when their decisions have these sort of outcomes. Nothing wrong with making more when things go well, but if you're going to take a larger piece of the pie, then you need to be prepared to take a smaller piece when things go wrong (aka, cut executive pay before layoffs, etc.).
  
  If a company commits a large crime they should be shut down or nationalized. People can get the death penalty so companies should too
  
  That would mean that rich people would be punished for something.
  
  Disgorgement. It should be the bare minimum punishment floor. The problem with everything right now is the juice is still worth the squeeze cuz they all want to be able to do it
  
  Fine should only be the punishing part of it (yes, I'd expect it to be based on revenue and also have personal components), above restoring damages to everyone affected.
  
  Why does everyone hate ancap, when the ancap logic of fines is what I've just written.
  
  If Meta would restore damages for every its wrong proven to every person affected, it would go bankrupt. Here's your ancap answer to monopolies.
- TBF fines do more than that, they tank stock value if the company is publicly traded. That makes stockholders mad at the corporate leadership and threatens their jobs.
  
  That seems like a pretty weak consequence, and not an intended one. Worse, it's one likely to be least impactful for the worst offenders - a megacorp isn't going to care much about fines, and the market won't see any danger to their investment in them.
  
  Oh no 😱 the stock value!! I guess that makes up for all of the people dying because they were denied care.
So they spent $400m to save money? How many decades until they break even? Imagine what good that money could have done.
- I'm sure they're bilking patients out of hundreds of millions a year with that "investment."
- Given that medicaid costs something like 880000 million dollars, I can pretty much promise that it saved money if it was denying people en masse.
  
  The whole healthcare system private and public is corrupt and lining the pockets of the wealthy at scale. All the middlemen are leeches from the insurance companies, to the "service" companies that clean hospitals, nursing homes, to the medical supply companies that charge egregious prices.
  
  It doesn't matter if the healthcare provider is nonprofit because all the other ancillary services make loads and loads of cash... which means medicare/medicaid and all private insurances end up spending tens of thousands of dollars per patient, or more. Turns out... private health insurance profits are regulated to a percentage of money spent on treatments...more spend = more potential profits. It's a balancing act of raising insurance subscription prices and raising treatment cost negotiations so that they hit that percentage and maximize profit per year.
  
  880 thousand million dollars?
- Well no. They spent 400 million dollars and got a buggy system that routinely dropped people, assigned benefits to the wrong place, failed to load required data, and so much more. Medicaid isn't concerned with saving money.
  
  This isn’t about Medicaid. This is about conservatives constantly looking for their bogeyman.
algorithmic system, so...Software?
- Have to make it sound sinister. If everything said, someone made a typo, or overlooked something in their directions (programming is just a set of directions to me) we wouldnt be as upset maybe. Fred made a mistake, company didn't play the money to have the work replicated to verify it was correct. Fred didn't mean to overlook something, shit happens. But that isn't a great news story.
  
  Most issues come down to companies not wanting to employ enough people to have proper quality assurance. It's cheaper to get sued for a fraction of your profits later on.
As designed.
- I actually don't think this was by design TBH
"algorithmic system"? Was it a unix system?

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