Humana is saying that there is always a human int he loop, but not saying:
NaviHealth employees are instructed to hew closely to the AI-based predictions, keeping lengths of post-acute care to within 1 percent of the days estimated by nH Predict. NaviHealth employees who fail to do so face discipline and firing. “Humana banks on the patients’ impaired conditions, lack of knowledge, and lack of resources to appeal the wrongful AI-powered decisions,” the lawsuit filed Tuesday claims.
Vultures have more empathy, man.
The AI-powered model comes up with those dates by comparing a patient’s diagnosis, age, living situation, and physical function to similar patients in a database of 6 million patients. In turn, the model spits out a prediction for the patient’s medical needs, length of stay, and discharge date.
We’ve seen this sort of thing before. Calculating the mean, or expected, length of stay, defining that as the maximum length of stay, and then every so often recalculating and turning the screws a little tighter. Insurance companies do this in managed care programs to constantly cut down reimbursement, or at least used to. A lot of those programs finally tightened themselves right out of business, so I am not shocked to see this model resurrected targeting a more vulnerable population. Doctors had the ability to fight back on these schemes. They seem to have found a population that is much less able to do so. Fuck them.
And once more for the cheap seats:
PROFIT MOTIVE HAS NO PLACE IN HEALTHCARE!!!
A ten-year-old with a first offense…
…compared with these grown men who committed multiple offenses, pleaded guilty, and paid fines (no probation involved):
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/14/europe/hamas-suspects-arrested-terror-plot-europe-intl/index.html
Four suspected members of Hamas arrested in Europe over alleged terrorism plot
The weekend could be interesting!
we are getting socked down here! gale force winds, gusting to 45mph, inches of rain and 7-10ft seas. parts of the island are flooded badly. (we don’t flood. we’re on a high spot - a whopping 13ft above sea level!)
anyone coming to the Keys for holidays, don’t come down this weekend! gonna be nasty for a few more days!
Stay safe, man!
“Those who can’t do, try their damnedest to make no one else can either.” Insurance companies are the bane of my existence, and these asshats are the kapos that make the machine go.
The spice supplier, Negasmart, appears to be a small, 25-employee import operation. My bet is still on the contamination having originated in the source country, and the import operation probably not having the facilities, procedures, regulations or “economic incentives” to test the incoming ingredients.
I found a 2019 study of spices purchased in the 
and in various countries around the world. The work found 50% of the 50 spices tested had detectable lead, 30% were over the 2ppm limit, with spices coming from Georgia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Morocco with “very high” lead levels. The tables attached to the report are a bit alarming; the high lead levels from 
really stood out. The researchers don’t really go into the reasons per se, but note:
Lead may be added as a coloring agent, or to add weight for products sold by weight, or it can be introduced because of poor processing equipment; the presence of lead in air, dust, or soil where food is grown or processed can also contribute toward contamination.
Spices purchased in the tested lower, reading 3.2ppm at the 90th percentile of samples; far lower than 10 860pm at the same percentile for spices from . The researchers put this down to
… local and national surveillance and regulatory controls are in place to curtail the sale and distribution of contaminated products (eg, routine surveillance and enforcement conducted by DOHMH, New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, US Customs and Border Protection, and the US Food and Drug Administration [FDA]).
Maybe don’t “drain” those particular “swamps” after all, eh?
Get well soon, Kareem! We love you, dude!
On Halloween, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack, which rendered its web presence nonexistent, its collections access disabled, and even its wifi fried. Moreover, the cyberattack also swept the personal data of the British Library’s humans—its users, but, far more extensively, its staff—into the hands of an outside party. During the final week of November, images of the stolen data were presented for auction on the dark web, for sale to whoever’s willing to pay 20 bitcoin, or about £600,000. By making the library’s digital infrastructure into a commodity (in an open, albeit dark, market), a “ransomware gang” calling itself Rhysida hopes to pressure the British Library to pay up first.
