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Reporting Highlights

  • An Insurer Sanctioned: Three states found United’s algorithmic system to limit mental health coverage illegal; when they fought it, the insurer agreed to restrict it.
  • A Patchwork Problem: The company is policing mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, highlighting a key flaw in the U.S. regulatory structure.
  • United’s Playbook Revealed: The poorest and most vulnerable patients are now most at risk of losing mental health care coverage as United targets them for cost savings.

Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements.

By the end of 2021, United’s algorithm program had been deemed illegal in three states.

But that has not stopped the company from continuing to police mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, ProPublica found, after reviewing what is effectively the company’s internal playbook for limiting and cutting therapy expenses. The insurer’s strategies are still very much alive, putting countless patients at risk of losing mental health care.

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submitted 2 months ago by DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

Hurricane Milton dumped so much rain over parts of Florida’s Tampa Bay area that it qualified as a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event.

St. Petersburg had 18.31 inches of rain — or more than 1.5 feet — in the 24-hour period during which the storm made landfall, according to precipitation data from the National Weather Service.

That included a staggering 5.09 inches in one hour, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET — a level considered to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.

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In a randomized controlled trial, the probiotic Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis—used in many probiotic products, including Dannon's Activia yogurts—did nothing to improve bowel health in people with constipation, according to data from a randomized triple-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 119 points 2 months ago

At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said.

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Andy and Bill's law (en.wikipedia.org)
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submitted 2 months ago by DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

Black girls face more discipline and more severe punishments in public schools than girls from other racial backgrounds, according to a groundbreaking new report set for release Thursday by a congressional watchdog.

The report, shared exclusively with NPR, took nearly a year-and-a-half to complete and comes after several Democratic congressional members requested the study. Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, later with support from Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, asked the Government Accountability Office in 2022 to take on the report.

Over the course of the 85-page report, the GAO says it found that in K-12 public schools, Black girls had the highest rates of so-called "exclusionary discipline," such as suspensions and expulsions. Overall, the study found that during the 2017-18 school year, Black girls received nearly half of these punishments, even as they represent only 15% of girls in public schools.

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submitted 2 months ago by DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world
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submitted 2 months ago by DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world
  • A new rule proposal from the Biden administration would prohibit products that are subject to U.S.-China tariffs from being eligible for a special customs exemption.

  • The de minimis loophole allows packages with a value of less than $800 to enter the United States with relatively little scrutiny.

  • Officials say a recent explosion in the number of de minimis shipments is due largely to Chinese-linked online retail giants like Shein and Temu.

1

Responding to reports that prisoner contact with loved ones helps reduce the recidivism rate, state lawmakers last year approved a $1 million pilot project to allow inmates with good behavior to make one free 15-minute phone call per month to the outside world.

Pleased with its rollout, members of the Florida Senate Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations came back during the 2024 legislative session with a budget line item expanding the program to $2 million from an inmate trust fund, and not from general revenues.

But Gov. Ron DeSantis slashed that line item in June. Advocates for prison and criminal justice reform say that’s a problem.

“Keeping families connected is very important for re-entry and so is the education,” said Karen Stuckey, who’s had to deal with escalating phone bills as both her son and husband have been incarcerated in Florida prisons. “If you want somebody to be successful, you have to keep them connected to their families or their loved ones. Because when you get out, it’s really, really hard.”

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submitted 3 months ago by DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world to c/aiop@lemmy.world
11

What would happen inside an electromechanical central office if you left your phone off hook?

From the channel Connections Museum

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AMD is warning about a high-severity CPU vulnerability named SinkClose that impacts multiple generations of its EPYC, Ryzen, and Threadripper processors. The vulnerability allows attackers with Kernel-level (Ring 0) privileges to gain Ring -2 privileges and install malware that becomes nearly undetectable.

Tracked as CVE-2023-31315 and rated of high severity (CVSS score: 7.5), the flaw was discovered by IOActive Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, who named privilege elevation attack 'Sinkclose.'

Full details about the attack will be presented by the researchers at tomorrow in a DefCon talk titled "AMD Sinkclose: Universal Ring-2 Privilege Escalation."

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 125 points 4 months ago

Vaccines shouldn't be political. What is wrong with some Republicans?

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 150 points 9 months ago

That headline is a bait and switch.

One of the major nuclear research facilities belonging to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO)’s is installing a major rooftop solar system that will save $2 million.

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 158 points 11 months ago

Now do courthouses and see how well that goes.

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 272 points 11 months ago

Found the article where the screenshot came from, and wow it's even more infuriating! The VideoLAN folks tried to work with them for months, and Unity seems to have cranial rectal inversion.

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 264 points 11 months ago

You know what's free (as in beer and speech) and not being enshittified? Notepad++

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 139 points 1 year ago

Oh, that's evil. 😈

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 137 points 1 year ago

Case in point: her husband exposed himself to two young women while they were dating. She decided he was still marriage material. Absolute trash.

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 104 points 1 year ago

Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 301 points 1 year ago

Microsoft really needs an antitrust smackdown with their repeated behavior.

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 222 points 1 year ago

Copy and paste mirror

[Mod Post] The Future of IAmA : IAmA

To our users, AMA guests, and friends,

You may have noticed that, in spite of our history of past protests against Reddit's poor site management, this subreddit has refrained from protesting or shutting down during the recent excitement on Reddit.

This does not imply that we think things are being managed better now. Rather, it reflects our belief that such actions will not make any significant difference this time.

Rather than come up with new words to express our concerns, I think some quotes from the NYT Editorial we wrote back in 2015 convey our thoughts very well:

Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities.

Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.

The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site.

Amazing how little has changed, really.

So, what are we going to do about this? What can we change? Not much. Reddit executives have shown that they won't yield to the pressure of a protest. They've told the media that they are actively planning to remove moderators who keep subreddits shut down and have no intentions of making changes.

So, moving forward, we're going to run IAmA like your average subreddit. We will continue moderating, removing spam, and enforcing rules. Many of the current moderation team will be taking a step back, but we'll recruit people to replace them as needed.

However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:

  1. Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.

  2. Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).

  3. Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.

  4. Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.

  5. Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.

  6. Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.

  7. Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts

Moving forward, we'll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn't mean we're allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you'll need to pay more attention.

Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we'd be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.

Thanks for the ride everyone, it's been fun.

Sincerely,

The IAmA Moderator Team (2013-2023)

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DocMcStuffin

joined 2 years ago