Capitalism
But the Cigna review system that blocked van Terheyden’s claim bypasses those steps. Medical directors do not see any patient records or put their medical judgment to use, said former company employees familiar with the system. Instead, a computer does the work. A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers... See more
Patrick Rucker • How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them
Capitalism should be optimized for inventiveness and not just efficiency
Blue Cross and Blue Shield began as nonprofits that insured all comers. But as big profit-seeking insurers targeted younger and healthier people, the Blues were left to insure the older and less healthy, which made it impossible for them to continue. They turned to making money. Now, private equity runs hospitals, into the ground.
Robert Reich • How private equity is destroying the labors of love
Now, the GoFundMe and DonorsChoose thing is closely related, but it gets its own throughline. These platforms emerge to seemingly supplement gaps in the public safety net for things like education and health care. But instead, they’re in a kind of enabling feedback loop: instead of your taxes ensuring that kids have desks and cancer patients can... See more
The Problems of Modern Philanthropy
But this Google trial? By far the most important moment was when Judge Mehta denied a third-party motion to broadcast a publicly accessible audio feed of the trial for fear that information Google wishes wouldn’t be disclosed become public. Indeed, Google lawyers have explicitly argued that the judge should avoid allowing documents to become public... See more
Matt Stoller • How to Hide a $2 Trillion Antitrust Trial
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote the literary critic Fredric Jameson. One of the hardest elements to imagine is what capitalism has done to our perception of time via clocks. It now seems embedded into our very psychology to view time as a commodity that can be spent or wasted.
Joe Zadeh • The Tyranny Of Time
As a society, we are so fully invested in capitalism, competition and algorithms that it’s almost impossible to pull ourselves out of the cycle to see a bigger pattern, which is that we have entire economies built upon our misery.
The enshittification of dating apps
The Antitrust Division will hopefully respond with “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition.”