I went to Syracuse University and the police force there are a joke. They're your average overpaid, overworked hillbillies who will smoke a cigar in your face while issuing you a ticket and send everything less than a SWAT team to break up a house party.
> Police officer Anthony Fiorini said Mr Jackson's posture in the car was consistent with someone hiding drugs in his rectum.
What does that even mean? This should be the biggest red flag.
Our justice system is such a joke.
EDIT TO ADD:
That such a bullshit statement like the police officer made as justifiable reason to go through with violating his constitutional rights, and that now the victim needs to go through a lengthy (expensive) legal process for justice is my reasoning for saying our justice system is a joke.
Meanwhile there is another HN thread about package thieves and the amount of comments about how the police are TOO busy to solve those crimes.
Maybe stop with the dubious drug searches (Cocaine residue, really?) and take care of the real criminals.
"cops devise a second, more conventional way to obtain the information, and put that reverse-engineered method down on paper. The result is that law enforcement lies about the origins of its investigative method" [1]
They didn't like him, he had a record, they want to make an example of him.
Every defense attorney in the state should make a point of memorizing the names of the officers involved in this arrest, using this case to impugn their judgment in every other trial in which they are called as witnesses.
> He refused to pay, and the matter was ultimately dropped.
A description of the ultimate disposition is what's missing from most of these "huge bill" stories. I'm glad to see it was stated here that he straight up refused to pay, as he should have. And really this should be standard advice repeated in all of these healthcare-cost articles, perhaps along side references to form letters people can send to repudiate fraudulent charges. Barring an actual contract to render services, a hospital's position is the same as a busker playing an instrument at a subway stop!
But what really needs to start happening is for these hospitals to start being prosecuted for (attempted) fraud. You shouldn't be able to send fake bills to people in bad faith, and when you're called out just back off and have everything be fine.
But the hospital has no contract whatsoever with the suspect. All work was performed at the behest of the police. I can't just send you a bill for replying to your comment (saying it was done "for you") and have you be obligated to pay it!
It seems like a collections agency that keeps pushing an invalid debt is part of a conspiracy to commit fraud. And a report to the surveillance bureaus that "wrecks your credit" would be straightforward slander.
Most of the behavior here is best described by some very basic crimes. Why are we letting these organizations off the hook?
They're richer than regular people and can use that money to influence the laws that are made and influence prosecutors from going after them.
It's a glib response, but is there any other explanation that fits the observable data? If a random citizen performed the same actions against these organizations, does anyone here believe the citizen would get away with no issues?
The crazy part is that a doctor willingly violated the Hippocratic Oath in a state that could do virtually nothing to him for following the ethics of his profession.
Mr Jackson should use civil rights group lawyers to go after that doctor.
Per the article, the police then got legal rights against the patient's right to refuse, which means nothing to a doctor when it comes to an obligation of inaction.
The entire medical billing industry's standard practice is to shotgun out first-draft bills that bear little resemblance to reality and hope people are dumb enough to pay. I'm sure they save a bunch of money by not having to fix their buggy processes. Instead they get to outsource their work to patients who have to figure out the bills on their own initiative and come up with specific objections because their credit is on the line. I've had all of the following happen to me in the last few years:
- I get a bill in the mail for an ER visit and it's ludicrously high. I call the hospital and ask if a human has seen it or if it was just auto-generated. They tiredly take down my name as if this is the tenth time today, and promise a human will look into it. A week later I get a revised bill for a fraction of the original amount.
- I get a check for over $400 from the same hospital in the mail one day. A photocopied "to whom it may concern" note on a little slip of paper explains: "It has been determined that an overpayment is owed to you. Please see the enclosed check. Thank you." No other explanation or even a perfunctory "sorry we kept your money interest-free for a year."
- I get a medication partially covered by insurance and partially covered by copay assistance from the drug company, so that I pay nothing. A couple of weeks after starting it, I get a bill in the mail from CVS for a couple of hundred dollars. Oops. It's a billing error and I actually owe nothing, but now it's my responsibility to sort everything out between the various parties.
- I get a call out of the blue (flagged by Android as a suspected spam caller) from someone claiming to be a collections agency trying to collect a few hundred dollars for a blood test I don't even remember at first. They say they're the second collections agency who inherited this bill. I never got anything in the mail and this is the first I'm hearing of it, so I'm naturally suspicious, but they have all of my information and describe the blood test and it does sound familiar. I tell them to send me a bill - obviously I'm not going to give out my credit card number to a random caller. They call back the next week, again wanting me to settle the debt over the phone. I ask for a bill. They say they sent one. But I've still never gotten anything in the mail. Now I'm anxiously watching my credit report and hoping the reporting agencies will believe me when I tell them I was never billed.
Everything about this is a gigantic clusterfuck. The last thing we need is even higher healthcare costs, but this industry's behavior is so completely and hopelessly broken that if someone puts a shareholder-crushing mountain of additional patient protection regulation on the ballot, I'll vote for it out of sheer spite. But seriously, we desperately need single-payer to cut through this rainforest of billing bureaucracy. This is less like a functioning society than like a Kafka novel come to life.
I mean yes, and the mugging industry's standard practice is to demand your wallet and phone. Just because something is a standard practice doesn't mean it's also not criminal.
I, and everybody else, have similar stories to you. We aren't talking about the occasional mis-keying here or there - the entirety of their systems are setup to bill in bad faith, IMHO rising to the level of deliberate fraud.
I'm stuck on this because I would like to know what is the exact legal mechanism by which someone could actually be on the hook for the fraudulent charges? Could a major newspaper publish a self-help guide tomorrow complete with form letters to help people repudiate the baseless debt, and it would be a big enough trend that the surveillance bureaus would have to pay attention, and the problem would be solved? Or are there state laws that create implicit liability to health providers (ostensibly so they can be compensated when someone is unconscious when admitted) that are now being openly abused? If it's the latter, that's really where we should directing our ire-focus - there would be no other legal basis for retrospectively charging someone $61 for an ibuprofen! The only way you can get away with that level of gouging is if you take cash on the spot during a disaster, or apparently if you're a hospital.
Your example at CVS is especially glaring, as our basic expectation is that going to the store involves paying before leaving, and being done with that transaction. When I go to the grocery store, do I have to worry that I'll be receiving a bill in the mail at a later date? Maybe that's the true function of those "loyalty cards".
(I'd also like to point out that the root cause of much of your anxiety is worrying about how the surveillance agencies are going to judge you. I understand that there are many who have no choice about being in that position. What I can't abide is how our society has slipped so far that the overwhelming expectation is for everybody to be continually worried about their "permanent record".)
According to the article, it was cocaine "residue." And based on the rest of the officers' dubious claims (The victim bragged about having concealed drugs? Really?), how much do you want to bet the cops saw some dust on the interior and claimed it was cocaine residue to justify this arrest and search?
How is $4,600 justified for a rectal probe. United States has zero compassion for its citizens if it allows medical bills to exceed reasonable financial means of the average citizen. The average citizen only has so much in a lifetime for emergency funds. No rectal probe should take such a portion away.
It's a story that bears a parallel to what happened to a man in New Mexico a few years ago that resulted in multiple lawsuits against the police, a hospital and several physicians. [0] Ultimately the New Mexico case resulted in a damages award in the amount of 1.6 million dollars. [1]
We need to see more prosecutions of law enforcement community officers and job related civilians. How often do uniformed officers face grand jury scrutiny for lies told on the stand?
26 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 62.8 ms ] threadWhat does that even mean? This should be the biggest red flag.
Our justice system is such a joke.
EDIT TO ADD:
That such a bullshit statement like the police officer made as justifiable reason to go through with violating his constitutional rights, and that now the victim needs to go through a lengthy (expensive) legal process for justice is my reasoning for saying our justice system is a joke.
Meanwhile there is another HN thread about package thieves and the amount of comments about how the police are TOO busy to solve those crimes.
Maybe stop with the dubious drug searches (Cocaine residue, really?) and take care of the real criminals.
"cops devise a second, more conventional way to obtain the information, and put that reverse-engineered method down on paper. The result is that law enforcement lies about the origins of its investigative method" [1]
They didn't like him, he had a record, they want to make an example of him.
1: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/and-after-what-we-lear...
A description of the ultimate disposition is what's missing from most of these "huge bill" stories. I'm glad to see it was stated here that he straight up refused to pay, as he should have. And really this should be standard advice repeated in all of these healthcare-cost articles, perhaps along side references to form letters people can send to repudiate fraudulent charges. Barring an actual contract to render services, a hospital's position is the same as a busker playing an instrument at a subway stop!
But what really needs to start happening is for these hospitals to start being prosecuted for (attempted) fraud. You shouldn't be able to send fake bills to people in bad faith, and when you're called out just back off and have everything be fine.
Also, the hospital did actually perform work here, the crazy part is that they're billing the innocent suspect instead of the police here.
It seems like a collections agency that keeps pushing an invalid debt is part of a conspiracy to commit fraud. And a report to the surveillance bureaus that "wrecks your credit" would be straightforward slander.
Most of the behavior here is best described by some very basic crimes. Why are we letting these organizations off the hook?
It's a glib response, but is there any other explanation that fits the observable data? If a random citizen performed the same actions against these organizations, does anyone here believe the citizen would get away with no issues?
Mr Jackson should use civil rights group lawyers to go after that doctor.
- I get a bill in the mail for an ER visit and it's ludicrously high. I call the hospital and ask if a human has seen it or if it was just auto-generated. They tiredly take down my name as if this is the tenth time today, and promise a human will look into it. A week later I get a revised bill for a fraction of the original amount.
- I get a check for over $400 from the same hospital in the mail one day. A photocopied "to whom it may concern" note on a little slip of paper explains: "It has been determined that an overpayment is owed to you. Please see the enclosed check. Thank you." No other explanation or even a perfunctory "sorry we kept your money interest-free for a year."
- I get a medication partially covered by insurance and partially covered by copay assistance from the drug company, so that I pay nothing. A couple of weeks after starting it, I get a bill in the mail from CVS for a couple of hundred dollars. Oops. It's a billing error and I actually owe nothing, but now it's my responsibility to sort everything out between the various parties.
- I get a call out of the blue (flagged by Android as a suspected spam caller) from someone claiming to be a collections agency trying to collect a few hundred dollars for a blood test I don't even remember at first. They say they're the second collections agency who inherited this bill. I never got anything in the mail and this is the first I'm hearing of it, so I'm naturally suspicious, but they have all of my information and describe the blood test and it does sound familiar. I tell them to send me a bill - obviously I'm not going to give out my credit card number to a random caller. They call back the next week, again wanting me to settle the debt over the phone. I ask for a bill. They say they sent one. But I've still never gotten anything in the mail. Now I'm anxiously watching my credit report and hoping the reporting agencies will believe me when I tell them I was never billed.
Everything about this is a gigantic clusterfuck. The last thing we need is even higher healthcare costs, but this industry's behavior is so completely and hopelessly broken that if someone puts a shareholder-crushing mountain of additional patient protection regulation on the ballot, I'll vote for it out of sheer spite. But seriously, we desperately need single-payer to cut through this rainforest of billing bureaucracy. This is less like a functioning society than like a Kafka novel come to life.
I, and everybody else, have similar stories to you. We aren't talking about the occasional mis-keying here or there - the entirety of their systems are setup to bill in bad faith, IMHO rising to the level of deliberate fraud.
I'm stuck on this because I would like to know what is the exact legal mechanism by which someone could actually be on the hook for the fraudulent charges? Could a major newspaper publish a self-help guide tomorrow complete with form letters to help people repudiate the baseless debt, and it would be a big enough trend that the surveillance bureaus would have to pay attention, and the problem would be solved? Or are there state laws that create implicit liability to health providers (ostensibly so they can be compensated when someone is unconscious when admitted) that are now being openly abused? If it's the latter, that's really where we should directing our ire-focus - there would be no other legal basis for retrospectively charging someone $61 for an ibuprofen! The only way you can get away with that level of gouging is if you take cash on the spot during a disaster, or apparently if you're a hospital.
Your example at CVS is especially glaring, as our basic expectation is that going to the store involves paying before leaving, and being done with that transaction. When I go to the grocery store, do I have to worry that I'll be receiving a bill in the mail at a later date? Maybe that's the true function of those "loyalty cards".
(I'd also like to point out that the root cause of much of your anxiety is worrying about how the surveillance agencies are going to judge you. I understand that there are many who have no choice about being in that position. What I can't abide is how our society has slipped so far that the overwhelming expectation is for everybody to be continually worried about their "permanent record".)
“Officers found a bag of marijuana and cocaine residue in Mr Jackson's vehicle, reports the Post-Standard.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency
[0] https://blogs.findlaw.com/injured/2013/11/nm-man-sues-over-m...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/16/justice/new-mexico-search-set...