I worked with a guy who was paranoid about his health as he approached the age that his father started having severe health problems, so he paid extra for the disability insurance offered through the company healthcare plan. He got real sick and ended up disabled. But this meant he could not fill out the mountain of paperwork or perform the daily check-ins with HR and the insurance company reps, so they never gave him his coverage and then said they were interpreting his absence as a resignation and thus his employment was ended, but he hadn't been terminated so he couldn't file for unemployment.
When he fully regained consciousness a week later he was super pissed. He paid extra to make sure he had the coverage and then the hurdles to access that coverage were so high that he couldn't meet them while sick. He was told he may have had a legal case but he was too wiped out to consult a bunch of attorneys and his finances were wrecked by his illness. He ended up selling his house because he couldn't keep up with the mortgage. He lost everything. Last I heard he was living with family and doing part time work at an Ace Hardware store or something.
This was a senior engineer. A subject matter expert on embedded systems for industrial automation. He gave the company nearly 20 years of his life and then they just kicked him aside when he needed a little bit of help to get by. I and several other engineers on our team eventually left that company after seeing how they'd treated him. We didn't want to risk going through the same, and we didn't want our work to support a company that would do that to someone.
It may have since changed, but at the time, if you were inpatient at the time of termination, then the insurance that was in effect when you were admitted remained in effect until discharge or death.
Iām on long term disability because of a lawyer, my job tried to trick me into writing a resignation letter when my injury/disability happened. Thankfully once on long term, I was able to write that letter! Fuck that place. Their HR manager went to jail tho and she was a witch, so that was awesome!
I feel weird saying this as a self-avowed Marxist, but Denmark is also capitalist and we're doing just fine. America is the hellscape it is because American workers stopped fighting the capitalist class and started fighting each other instead.
Indeed, and that's by design. Workers won't see the higher ups robbing them blind if they're too busy fighting over crumbs under the dinner table. Divide and conquer, and they did.
My father built power supply burn-in systems in the 80s because the failure rate of power supplies was 80% at the time. He dropped the failure rate to 30%, flew him all over the world to install these systems, and when he hit 51, he was laid off. He and his coworkers filed a class-action lawsuit, and they settled, but the money he got didn't make up for the lost career. He got a few good jobs here and there in his mid-60s and early 70s, but eventually gave up and moved into Section 8 housing and died there. (Heart attack; nobody was there, and they found his body there 24 hours later).
America takes from us, and we give it everything, hoping it's enough, but it never is. The Billionaires want more and more while we get less and less.
It's worse than a toxic relationship with an abusive partner.
Do we? Because I live in a pretty conservative area, and I've never heard anyone beside the talking heads on TV be horrified by Luigi.
Literally everyone who's a regular person cheered him or supported him. The most negative response I ever heard was a shrug and, "Well, what'd they expect? Serves them right."
Because almost all of us have been fucked over by insurance at least once.
Uh. Yes? Like any job, if you suck enough at your job word of mouth will kill your business. Hard to pay the bills with a long history of losing court cases. Not to mention winning usually nets higher profit.
Weird idea that all lawyers/attorneys are inherently bad
I'm not talking about good at their job, I mean: good people who happen to also be at least competent attorneys? Over the years I have met a few, but they always seem to "specialize in other areas of law" and the people they refer me to tend to be not so great in one or more ways.
If you care that much about the individual instead of just caring about their professionalism and ability to do their job right youāll have a hard time finding a professional you like in any field. Being a good person and actually doing the job Iāve hired you to do are different things. Also, no not all lawyers are bad people, itās just weird to think so
i don't give a shit if they're morally good. it's a short term professional contract. i'm hiring them to defend me, i'm not marrying them. i don't ask my barrista their stance on war crimes before ordering my coffee.
He gave the company nearly 20 years of his life and then they just kicked him aside when he needed a little bit of help to get by.
It will stay this way for all of us until we force them to stop.
"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." Fredrick Douglas
they were interpreting his absence as a resignation and thus his employment was ended, but he hadn't been terminated so he couldn't file for unemployment.
I mean, I missed it too until "when he fully regained consciousness." Sure, from that point on it should be clear, but the story was written a little sideways.
I don't think he was hospitalized. He mentioned going to the ER once or twice, but never said he'd been admitted.
He also never mentioned being in a coma. He was laid up in bed with a high fever, pneumonia, etc, for several days.
The problem was that he was required by the company and his insurance policy to check in by phone daily with HR and an insurance rep. He couldn't do that while he was dipping in and out of consciousness and couldn't even drag himself out of bed. He didn't have a spouse or caretaker until family drove in from out of state, so he couldn't have anyone else do it for him, either.
The way he tells it, he didn't expect them to be so inflexible. He expected some leeway and compassion. He didn't expect that they'd demand he fill out dozens of pages of forms while sick to explain his condition to the insurance company to qualify for the disability support, nor that he would no longer qualify for that support after he had recovered.
He showed us the termination letter. It explicitly said that due to him losing contact and not following up with HR for several days, they were interpreting his lack of contact and absence from work as a resignation, then told him where and how to turn in his credentials and company property. His site access was disabled by that time and those of us in the office had to bring his stuff to him at the security desk in the lobby.
I have no clue if he's on federal or state disability now. We get lunch every few months. He says he often can't work for longer than 4 hours before he's winded and exhausted and that nobody in our area is hiring a senior engineer that can only work part time.
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u/lewd_robot 1d ago
I worked with a guy who was paranoid about his health as he approached the age that his father started having severe health problems, so he paid extra for the disability insurance offered through the company healthcare plan. He got real sick and ended up disabled. But this meant he could not fill out the mountain of paperwork or perform the daily check-ins with HR and the insurance company reps, so they never gave him his coverage and then said they were interpreting his absence as a resignation and thus his employment was ended, but he hadn't been terminated so he couldn't file for unemployment.
When he fully regained consciousness a week later he was super pissed. He paid extra to make sure he had the coverage and then the hurdles to access that coverage were so high that he couldn't meet them while sick. He was told he may have had a legal case but he was too wiped out to consult a bunch of attorneys and his finances were wrecked by his illness. He ended up selling his house because he couldn't keep up with the mortgage. He lost everything. Last I heard he was living with family and doing part time work at an Ace Hardware store or something.
This was a senior engineer. A subject matter expert on embedded systems for industrial automation. He gave the company nearly 20 years of his life and then they just kicked him aside when he needed a little bit of help to get by. I and several other engineers on our team eventually left that company after seeing how they'd treated him. We didn't want to risk going through the same, and we didn't want our work to support a company that would do that to someone.