Notices by TayFoNay🍿 (tayfonay@beige.party)

May Tim Walz give us 4 years of trolling

If you don’t already know and love @dgar you might be missing out on some of the best dad jokes and memes on the Fediverse. Give them a follow on this 16th day of #FANuary

Guys. I think I’m aging wrong. They say you’re supposed to get more conservative and prefer warmer weather as you get older, and I’m on the opposite path. Is there a pill I should be taking? Preferably with a weird name and catchy advertising jingle.

Long shot but can anyone identify this bug? They get stuck in the surf on beaches in Kauai, perhaps other Hawaiian islands IDK. This was taken on Hanakapiai beach back in November. I naturalist is like 🤷♀️ might be a vespoid wasp. It’s about an inch long.

#bugs #insects #hawaii #kauai

@dalias Oh I agree with you but they’re doing it without author knowledge after the submission.

@dalias On who? I was referring to Elsevier now using AI in the editing process.

I mean call me the asshole but it’s coming up on 2 years since I left Northwestern and people I entrusted with finishing a small research project still haven’t submitted the paper. The last email was on October 30th where the lead author was going to “review the author guidelines” of the journal we’ve selected. So I sent a cunty email this morning saying I was going to take over and submit it. This is despite my best efforts to keep my boundaries since, you know, I don’t fucking work there any more. But the project was funded by a charity organization and we have a responsibility to finish the work. The good news is now AI will likely be involved in the publication process 🙄

Day 5 of #FANuary

@VeroniqueB99 ‘s timeline is a treasure trove of memes and other various silliness. Whenever I see her on my home feed I immediately hop over to her account and scroll the goodness.

Heard today is #WorldIntrovertDay so figured I’d boost this https://beige.party/@tayfonay/110707612006342729

Me: I’d like to live in Norway one day

People: but it’s dark all winter!

“Dark all winter” in Lofoten:

One thing I’d love to get included in the insurance discussion is the mental toll these denials take. Not to pathologize people, but normalize how humans instinctively respond to constant threat to life and well-being. I was retained as an expert witness in Chris’ case against UHC to discuss 2 things: if I thought the stress from them denying his treatment could exacerbate his autoimmune disease (it did IMO) and how the denial impacted his mental health. Catastrophic medical illness already can lead some people to develop post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, and insurance denials just compound this. I’m not sure how people are just supposed to be ok with all of this shit. But medical trauma is real and needs to be brought into the conversation.

Word on the curb is ABC News is going to air a 1-hour special on US healthcare next week, and they’re going to include Chris’ story that ProPublica broke 2 years ago that revealed incredibly heinous practices at UHC.

Now, he and others went to the MSM with the story back when it came out and were met with “meh” at the time, which was incredibly disheartening. One local news outlet in Minneapolis did a piece, that’s pretty much it. It kinda speaks to how messed up this country is that it necessitated someone getting assassinated for this Machiavellian insurance system to get widespread attention. But hey, better late than never? I am curious how they’re gonna spin it.

Look I’m not saying but I’m just here to report anecdotal coincidences of heath insurance companies approving coverage like it’s their job (oh wait it is) in the wake of last week’s events.

Most of the claims for my mental health practice that UHC was taking their sweet time paying all of a sudden got paid. Some were a few months old, just sitting there for no discernible reason. About $10,000 worth.

My Anthem blue cross plan approved the prior authorization for my iron infusion after 3 weeks. I really thought it was on its way to denial and would require an appeal. Usually this is the case when a PA takes more than a few days, in my experience.

I’m sure this won’t last and we’ll resume our regularly scheduled programming soon. But this is nice.

Greetings for the day!

We read with great interest your [randomly selected toot] and would like to invite you to submit your original toots to The Journal of the Annals of Mastodon, published by Elsevier. For a small publishing fee ($2,000) you can gain maximum visibility for your shitposts that someone of your esteemed expertise and great accomplishments in the critical field of shitposting deserves.

Before I quit my associate prof job in 2023, my first task every morning was to delete between 3 and 10 spam emails from predatory journals that all started with Greetings for the day!

TIL about the "CEO Dark Personality"

Like medicine, psychology is broken up into sub-disciplines. In the corporate world, "industrial organizational" theory is the prevailing thing. This is different than my world, clinical psychology, which focuses on diagnosing and treating mental illness. My field has a lot of fucking problems to say the least. But what are we doing over in I/O?

In I/O, they don't diagnose people with things, and they rely on different testing to get various "personality" profiles to help people with their professional development and improve workplace...stuff. I went poking around in the I/O literature and came across the term "CEO Dark Personality" which consists of a collection of traits like psychopathy/sociopathy, narcissism, and machiavellianism, sadism, and hubris. It's not a clinical diagnosis because I/O isn't in the business to diagnose.

Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of the research is paywalled and I no longer have my academic library card. I'm not sure what to think that there are enough studies on this to warrant systematic reviews. Like hey, we've identified this trend of these certain shitty human qualities that are more prevalent amongst these upper management types. That's great. But how do we get this research to translate into any meaningful change when they're all in charge of...everything?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886922004561

@Kierkegaanks yeah, moving away from diagnostic labels. But it's the same story.

The man on the calls was hard core MAGA. I know this because on a zoom call Chris had with the guy his background was a wallpaper of AR-15s with little red hats on them. I’d say hand to god, but I’m an atheist. Hand to Yoda?

Here’s the thing about the media and politicians harping on people’s insensitivity regarding the UHC murder. Mr. Johnson was a “family man” etc.

I do know he and his fellow C-Suite types had been “very upset by” a patient I was seeing going to the press with recordings of internal phone calls of UHC employees laughing with glee at their denials of his life-saving medications. These recordings were obtained via legal discovery.

The people on the calls, in charge of Chris’s appeal, were able to get the denials by ignoring and burying one MD’s review stating Chris needed the treatment and sending it to another who said he didn’t. This MD admitted, under oath, he never reviewed the file. He just signed off on what one of the people on those phone calls had sent him.

When I tweeted about them laughing I called this sociopathic behavior. I had around 4000 followers I think and this was pre-Musk so the algorithm still kinda worked. And this also “upset several very important people.”

I get the articles were bad press, and corporations hate bad press. But I also think the C-suite executives at UHC were legitimately pissed at the insinuation these behaviors were sociopathic.

I don’t think they gave a shit about the 2 employees on the calls, who ultimately left UHC. Rather I think they engaged in similar behavior in their investor meetings, just at scale. Laughing about the collective denials, how their systems worked to maximize profits to the tune of $200 billion, etc. So much laughing at the suffering their company inflicted. To call that anything other than brilliant leadership? The audacity. We are “very important people.”

Studies suggest around 40% of CEOs meet the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder - aka sociopaths. APD falls in the same category of the DSM-5 as narcissistic personality disorder so there’s some fundamental overlap.

APD really cannot be treated. Neither can NPD, because there is usually a fundamental lack of insight and therapy becomes a stage for them to discuss with righteous indignation how others have wronged them. Like when people call their company out on a culture of horrific behavior. With receipts.

But please, media, go on about what a good person he was.

Listen to the recorded phone calls here:

https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-insurance-denial-ulcerative-colitis

Still on my bullshit about UHC. Feel free to scroll by 😊

When a patient I was working with sued UHC, I learned a lot about who has courage. And who would publicly speak out against their denials of care beyond the generic tweets that some of my colleagues liked to do at the time. But also learned how deep UHC’s reach goes.

When the ProPublica article came out, I shared it with those same tweeting colleagues (and others) and while they expressed outrage to me, they remained silent. Why? Because they feared retribution from their employers (academic medical centers) who feared retribution from the largest health insurance company in the world. Chris and I were sure the leaders in this particular disease space would amplify what happened, and try to put real, collective pressure on UHC. When they didn’t, he was crushed. I was livid. I’m sure this contributed to me eventually quitting my job.

One senior physician’s response to me sending the article to them was “way too long.” That’s it.

One, who refused to be an expert witness and wouldn’t go on record with ProPublica, got mad when the article took off and they weren’t in it. Because all they really care about is their bullshit image and being in control.

The president of a patient advocacy group got mad when their banal comments weren’t used in the article. They got madder when I suggested their muted response was maybe because UHC was a major donor to their organization. If you wanna burn down a bridge in your career, do that 😂

Point being, all those billions of dollars have long tentacles that influence every facet of a patient’s life. Even those people who are “on our team!”

So look into the donors to disease non-profits. There may be some really gross relationships there. Google your physicians and look for conflict of interest statements they may have out there on a conference PowerPoint. Some may contract with UHC (or others) to review claims, which can be very lucrative.

I have my theories as to why UHC donated to that particular organization but it’s just my opinion so I’ll refrain. However, the page on their website that I found it on mysteriously was taken down shortly after my accusation. Because as we all know, stuff put online totally disappears when you delete it.

There were 5 physicians who stepped up that I want to acknowledge. 2 eagerly agreed to be expert witnesses to fight for some justice. The other 2 were told by their employers they could not be a witness. 1 was very vocal on social media and said they were fine if they got in trouble. The other also went on record despite knowing they could be fired. The last was Dr. Glaucomaflecken, who does the comedic videos about U.S. healthcare. He amplified the story to millions of followers, and made UHC specific videos to boot.

They were a tiny fraction but their courage meant everything when so many looked the other way in silence.