Serious Design Failure At USAspending.gov? 207
theodp writes "Over at Intelligent Enterprise, Seth Grimes declares the Federal Government's USAspending.gov website a travesty, calling it 'almost a parody of a government-transparency site.' Among the faults cited by Grimes is a botched 'Federal Spending FY 2009 YTD' pie chart that graced USAspending.gov's home page. Not only were the sizes of pie segments not in proportion to the percentage labels (due to a Google Chart API error), the colors in the pie chart didn't even match the colors and values in the table immediately below the chart. Lucky for the Feds, Grimes didn't get a chance to look behind the curtain at the Federal IT Dashboard, where they forgot to remove a (commented) reference to a Google spreadsheet that states 'These totals are pretty poor numbers' (Google workbook). Oops!"
Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Because what did we have before? Data via third parties that had to use a FOIA and sit and wait for it? Numbers that were years old? Or we had to visit 50 state sites that were all laid out differently and aggregate the data? And we're ripping on usaspending.gov for design flaws? Okay, from a web developer's standpoint these are pretty egregious errors but so what?
At least it reads "These totals are pretty poor numbers." and not "We really had to cook the books to get this to look right." Hell, now you know where to start looking if you want to do what you should be doing: criticizing the government based on their spending and IT (mis)management!
How would you react if the next president did away with usaspending.gov? Happy that the travesty of a parody site is gone?
Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation (Score:4, Informative)
I agree. When I first read the title, "Serious" jumped out at me (possibly with the assistance of being the first word), and luckily for me I actually RTFA'd. Speaking for myself and more than likely any one who's done any web programming, a minor mistake of data passing being in the incorrect format for the Google APIs to digest is much much less than a "serious" design failure. In fact, its not a design failure at all. Its a code error, and luckily (or possibly unluckily) for the guys at USAspending.gov, Google's APIs don't just segfault out and crash the page, instead they try to parse it in a "is this what you wanted?" sort of way.
TL:DR - its not serious, its not a design failure, its a coding bug, and as TFA says its a 2-3 line fix. Not newsworthy if you ask me.
Pie Charts (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised the guy rips into the bug calling the Google API and even says "Here's the government's chart done right" without mentioning that piecharts are a bad way to represent comparative data like this in the first place [informatio...gement.com] 3D pie charts may look fancy, but they make it more difficult to compare the actual data (which is supposed to be the whole point of plotting it). They are even worse than 2D barcharts, at least with 2D you are only looking at data being relative to slice area, and not being rendered at an angle - look at the edge in the plot he uses [google.com], there's as much if not more purple on display as the supposedly larger green slice. What's wrong with a bar chart for visualising comparative data like this? Surely it would give the reader a much more informed quick overview of spending?
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I'm a big fan of flat pie charts. Also, something like a 3D pie chart makes it easier to spin the appearance for whatever reason.
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piecharts are a bad way to represent comparative data like this in the first place...3D pie charts may look fancy, but they make it more difficult to compare the actual data (which is supposed to be the whole point of plotting it)
Give that man a cigar. This is exactly what I thought when I looked at the .gov page: this is no worse than any other Power Point presentation I've sat through. The real problem isn't some error in the algorithm that draws the pie, but in the notion that tarting up a graph by making it 3-D somehow makes it better. Of course, the opposite is true—in art, perspective is used to create an illusion of depth in a 2-D medium. But illusion is precisely what we don't want in the visual representation of data!
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Transparency, I would think, requires the government to present as much factual information as possible with the explanations needed to understand the data. Differing interpretations of that data aren't part of transparency, they are part of what transparency enables, and part of what it provides the means for people to evaluate.
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Yes but you just said "explanations needed to understand the data" which means you'll have interpretations. For example I think "military spending" means tanks, planes, et cetera. But other people say it should also include payments made to Saudi Arabia's kings and nobility to protect the oil supply to run those tanks and planes. Who's right?
I have no idea. And even if you write unbiased, the bias and preconceptions will still sneak-in.
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Well, the use of language is always subject to interpretation to a certain degree, but actually the "explanations needed to understand the data" means that the data would be accompanied by sufficient explanatory material so that what the facts were would be as clear as possible.
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I don't see any problem with using a piechart, so long as the chart is lying flat such that the areas are relative to one another. You do have to be careful to avoid using bright colors (white, green) cause the eyes are more sensitive to these, but otherwise I think a piechart is a fine way to represent different sizes of things.
That's why some are pushing for a set semantic vocabulary. In theory(if it could be done), it would solve problems such as these. I think I remember a non-profit working on a federal ontology and vocabularies but I can not seem to find it now.
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It should at least flag these errors (see Postel's Law [wikipedia.org]). Maybe it does; just wanted to note that there is something between "reject" and "accept without even a warning".
Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end, the graphical representation of data is nearly always skewed, whether intentionally or not and in the end, as long as the underlying data is available (and many time, especially in government it is not) you can do you own charts to determine what is correct.
While the layperson (or CEO) likes pretty pictures and big flashy dashboards that have little green and red and black arrows to show what's going on, it's not transparent until you can get your hands on the data itself. Being that I have fought with local governments and state/federally funded groups for years to give me the underlying data (and not some self-created aggregation), I applaud any effort to give us what we need.
Yay.
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In the end, the graphical representation of data is nearly always skewed, whether intentionally or not and in the end, as long as the underlying data is available (and many time, especially in government it is not) you can do you own charts to determine what is correct.
I don't disagree with your post's general premise. However, why should visualizations necessarilly be skewed? I can understand if you would have said they were light on data, or inhernetly vague. Skewed is a word that screams intent, kind of like 'spin'. For instance, having a scale that shows only 43-44y when everything is around 43.5 just to make the differences seem larger sounds intentional. But a 2d pie chart based on percentages can't exactly be skewed as long as all(or relevant) data is involved
Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation (Score:5, Interesting)
We should be happy that they even were aware that their numbers were poor. That means that someone is, at the least, paying attention if not objectively analyzing the data. The fact that it is a government agency makes it that much more astounding (IE. it's not going to make a difference in their paycheck or pension most likely).
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That's a big problem with government: they don't compensate high performers appropriately. Furthermore, they routinely compensate poor performers and promote them out of departments.
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And that is different from private company exactly not at all. There's a reason why both CEOs and politicians often tend to be sociopaths whose main goal seems to be to fill their own coffers. It's not unique to the government at all.
The government screws up. So do private companies. The government does great things. So do private companies. I've yet to see objective data telling me that private companies are inherently better at something compared to "the government". Both are run by humans.
In fact, where
Not necessarily so. (Score:2)
Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Government managers don't routinely get hundred-million-dollar golden parachutes for losing billions of dollars and costing tens of thousands of people their jobs, either. If you really think industry is any better at rewarding good performance and punishing bad performance, you're delusional.
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When it is a problem in the private industry, people stop investing and/or the company goes bankrupt. It took government to bail them out and basically support the rewarding of bad performance. Meanwhile, government can print money and increase taxes without any kind of "check" in the marketplace.
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The culture of golden parachutes developed long before the current bailout mess. So did the practice of investors and boards of directors rewarding executives for running companies into the ground. For the last couple of decades, at least, one of the best ways to make a fortune has been: take over a failing company, lay off a bunch of workers, take a bonus for "improving the bottom line," sell stock at an artificially inflated value, and then, when it becomes apparent that the company is headed for a cra
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I don't know that the difference here is as big as you might think; high-ranking elected and appointed officials (the rough public equivalent of the senior executive leadership of private firms who you see getting those kinds of rewards) whose actions in office are useful to a narrow constituency (whether in terms of economic benefit, or
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Sure, but these lucrative post-government positions aren't a matter of government policy. What you describe is more equivalent to Company Y hiring the former CEO of Company X after he runs Company X into the ground -- which happens all the time too, of course. But there's nothing for any government employee, from the lowliest clerk all the way up to the President, which comes anywhere near to golden parachute obscenity which has become SOP in the "efficient, competition-driven free market" I keep hearing
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No. Private companies pay executives for the associated risks for being executives. If you think you're up to the job of managing a multinational corporation, then I implore you to give it a shot.
Define the associated risks, please.
Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation (Score:4, Insightful)
Private companies pay executives for the associated risks for being executives.
Risk? What risk, exactly? Company does well: executives get fat bonuses and their stock options increase in value. Company does badly: executives get giant golden parachutes. There is no penalty for failure at the boardroom level.
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Soo.... just like modern industry except that those at the top in industry are paid vast globs of money more?
Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh. I read the bit about incorrect colors and sizes of pie slices, and laughed. I can't read a color coded chart anyway. GIVE ME A BAR GRAPH DAMMIT! Better yet, just post the numbers. ;^)
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Mint.com gives very nice pie chart with lines coming from the slices to the labels. Much better than a colored squares key.
Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation (Score:5, Insightful)
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oookay (Score:4, Informative)
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I haven't either, but I'm assuming it's more like I didn't get the contract so I'll criticise the guy who did. Which is why I won't read it.
Whatever. (Score:4, Funny)
It's good enough for Government work.
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The Important Thing is Existence (Score:4, Interesting)
In terms of government it is considerably harder to make bring these things into existence and to remove them once they're already there. Changing it after it already exists is trivial. And that's what's important and significant about this: it exists. The general population has facilitated access to something that was obscure and hidden behind a wall of government before. This may not seem like much but I think the successful creation of this type of transparency throughout the government, and if possible embedding it systemically into government processes, that we will see a great improvement in terms of freedom, success, and efficiency of our government.
It's similar to the way open source applications always get bugs patched faster than commercial implementations--crowdsourcing is a good way to catch errors. That will undoubtedly apply to government as well, especially when many politicians make their living relying on their practices being obscured from the public.
A step in the right direction (Score:4, Interesting)
They are merely tallying points (Score:3, Insightful)
its not like they are out to be serious. If they were the same government promising more openness would not be ramming near trillion dollar bills through Congress without a chance for public discussion, let alone reading of by the voting parties.
then again, change might mean soliciting bids for a system to systematically scrape all non-hidden data on popular sites like facebook and myspace https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=eec856940efb75b2b1c11e2b1d5660a4&tab=core&_cview= [fbo.gov]
Re:They are merely tallying points (Score:4, Informative)
a system to systematically scrape all non-hidden data on popular sites like facebook and myspace
Did you even read that link? The job it describes consists of archiving all the web content produced by the EOP (Executive Office of the President). Where does it say anything about facebook or myspace? Is it after the secret paragraphs that talk about the death panels and hiding the President's birth certificate?
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...The job it describes consists of archiving all the web content produced by the EOP (Executive Office of the President). Where does it say anything about facebook or myspace? ...
Wow, knee jerk repsonse. Shivetya was filling in examples for the following statement in the link in question:
The contractor shall include in the information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites. Publicly-accessible sites may include, but are not limited to social networking sites.
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Agreed.
If you post a comment on a government-run website, it is reasonable to think that the comment will be saved as part of an official record. If that website happens to be hosted via facebook it is a reasonable extension to think that comments stored there would also be an official record.
If they were spidering all of facebook looking for anybody who says anything mean about the President that would be different. However, it is pretty dumb to post death threats on Obama's facebook page and not think t
Insightful? (Score:2, Informative)
Beware, right wing trolls have mod points today (Score:2)
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Yeah, that kind of nonsense is only appropriate if there are brown people that need killing.
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If they were the same government promising more openness would not be ramming near trillion dollar bills through Congress without a chance for public discussion, let alone reading of by the voting parties.
If Congress isn't doing it's job, then it's the fault of Congress, not the one that has to implement the laws they pass.
then again, change might mean soliciting bids for a system to systematically scrape all non-hidden data on popular sites like facebook and myspace
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=eec856940efb75b2b1c11e2b1d5660a4&tab=core&_cview=0&cck=1&au=&ck= [fbo.gov]
You mean archiving postings by the White House to third-party websites, and any replies to those postings by users of those websites, in the White House itself rather than relying them being archived by those third-party websites? Since we've already seen third-party content providers totally lose all their data, and since the White House is required by law to document its communications
Re:A step in the right direction (Score:4, Funny)
Seems to me like the site is a work in progress and will improve with time
Then where is the digging_man.gif? Where is are the road cones with flashing beacons, or the web 2.0 equivalent, the beta status?
No. This must be assumed to be a finished website and judged "as is"
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Looks like a typical IT contractor job.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're in IT long enough, you've probably seen a million sites and software packages like this in use at large companies. In my experience, this is usually the result of a low-bid IT contractor getting a last-minute request to slap something together. Of course, in-house resources can screw things up badly too, but high-dollar consulting/contracting deals seem to have a special knack for it. Some places have great results with outsourcing/contracting, but others make it impossible to get high-quality work done in a reasonable time.
It sucks that something as public as the federal spending-accountability website has obvious problems, but how much time do you think whoever won that contract got to get the site live?
I'd be interested in hearing from an MBA-type about what the actual rationale for hiring third party IT help is. I know it's usually driven by raw costs and the fact that "IT's not strategic." But what is it that's actually taught in business school that has every executive that drives the whole outsourcing push? Or is it really just "my golf buddy is doing it at his company."?
Disclaimer: In the government case, I can definitely see the need for contract help. Projects would probably have a really hard time surviving administration changes, internal squabbles, etc.
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In my experience, this is usually the result of a low-bid IT contractor getting a last-minute request to slap something together.
$18 million for a website is "low-bid"??
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The $18 million contract was for recovery.gov, not usaspending.gov.
Oh, that's right! I get them confused (wonder why).
usaspending.gov is the site run by our old buddy Vivek Kundra. You know, the guy with the impressive resume that, it turns out, includes impressive CIO positions at companies where he was the only employee [oreilly.com]. Impressive.
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That may be, but without further information, is it not okay to assume usaspending.gov was paid a similar sum? Do you think they paid that team in waffles instead? If so, why?
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Can't write HTML.... (Score:5, Informative)
The site's pages don't even have a proper BODY or HTML close tags..
Jeez.
Eric
Re:Can't write HTML.... (Score:5, Informative)
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I didn't bother going that far since I was pretty sure the Validator would asplode..
E
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Not to mention the 253 errors from the W3C Validation site.
Can you truly blame them, when Google main page, probably single the most visited page on the Net today, is showing 46 Errors [w3.org]?
As a side note, ironically, Bing has fewer - 12 [w3.org] - mostly because of improper use of P and DIV inside SPAN.
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1153 errors.
Ebay: 253 errors
I could go on but what's the point.
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in case you were wondering its my second time on the internet
Bugzilla? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bugzilla? (Score:4, Informative)
You mean something like this?
Microsoft Contracts [usaspending.gov]
I mean come on, the search by contractors was only one click from the main page ;)
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Actually, my mistake, this is the correct link:
Microsoft Corporation Contracts [usaspending.gov]
The initial search (linked in parent) for some reason included the "United States Government" in the search results for Microsoft as a parent company.
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Re:Bugzilla? Outsourced. (Score:2)
I'm betting most Windows stuff goes through middlemen - think outsourcing companies like HP, IBM, EDS, and smaller. You pay the company to purchase, install, configure, and babysit, and Microsoft gets the money, without it being tracked.
You'd probably want to see how much was spent on operating systems, if they have it broken down to those type of purchase. Sadly it looks like no.
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I'd be far less concerned about the tens of millions ($52m in 2009) going to Microsoft and more worried about the tens of billions ($26b in 2009) going to companies like Lockheed Martin [usaspending.gov] where $11b of it weren't even competed contracts.
Less heavy breathing, please (Score:2)
This story would have been a lot more appealing without the hyper-ventilated media fishbowl aspects (serious design flaws! total failure of web 2.0 principles! complete lack of transparency! they didn't respond to my wiki posts!).
As regards transparency, compared to what we had before, just having numbers like this up in the public puts government CIOs in a very hot seat, indeed. Just imagine if your own CIO had to do likewise with your own firm's numbers! Yow.
Let's help them out here, not bash them in
Another cynical comment! (Score:2)
In other breaking news, the sky is blue.
Serious Troll Failure at that article (Score:3, Insightful)
That guys trolls about "major design flaws" on a website that was slapped together within a month of President Obama taking office... gimme a break.
The fact that a government operation was able to put that information out that quickly is just impressive and unprecedented.
I wonder if TFA author would be able to put together a website of such scope and functionality in such short amount of time... and without any bugs when he claims to have "spent way too much time" troubleshooting just the pie chart.
Maybe he works for the shop that came second on the bid?
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With a grain of salt (Score:4, Interesting)
The govt. always gets highly critizied. Or even when someone is just making a simple obersvation it all of the sudden becomes a "slam".
Can you imagine if companies had to bear this sort of total public critisim. How many companies have stupid errors on there website, menus, marketing, or anything else and we don't get upset.
I just take it with a grain of salt and hope things get better. The govt. isn't going to be perfect becuase it's ran by human beings...just like everything else.
newness is not an excuse in this case (Score:5, Informative)
But this isn't their first pass. The underlying data systems -- FAADS and FPDS -- have existed since the 90s, and have been riddled with errors throughout their existence. Instead of fixing the problems, OMB continues to slap new coats of paint on the same lousy data.
It's nice that we've got a new USASpending.gov, and I agree that it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on a buggy visualization. But the underlying data is terrible, and so far no one is showing the will to fix it. Just look at USASpending's "data quality" tab -- it talks about the completeness of each row. Well, that's great, but it tells you nothing about the thousands upon thousands of missing rows, nor about the rows that massively under- or over-report their dollar amounts.
At Subsidyscope [subsidyscope.com], the project on which I work, we've delved into these problems in more depth. Those who'd like to learn more about the shortcomings of the data systems powering USASpending can find a discussion of the relevant issues here [subsidyscope.com].
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Old, crappy systems gets maintenance and continue to function, barely. What's next? Donuts have fat in them? People die of heart attacks?
It doesn't matter if what they have is old or can be now made with rails or whatnot. It matters that it does the job. And you examples of failure have nothing to do with website. They have to do with how data is stored on the backend. And if people are not reporting their data, how is it the fault of the website???
Garbage in = garbage out. All data management systems can o
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Old, crappy systems gets maintenance and continue to function, barely. What's next? Donuts have fat in them? People die of heart attacks?
It doesn't matter if what they have is old or can be now made with rails or whatnot. It matters that it does the job. And you examples of failure have nothing to do with website. They have to do with how data is stored on the backend. And if people are not reporting their data, how is it the fault of the website???
Garbage in = garbage out. All data management systems can only report the data that they have, not the data that they should have or ought to have.
In other words, nothing ever Changes?
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Mistake? (Score:2)
"they forgot to remove a (commented) reference to a Google spreadsheet"
Sounds like transparency to me. Another promise kept. Working as designed.
You CANNOT make this stuff up.
Missing the biggest outflows (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole exercise is a political manipulation anyway. The largest government outlays - the so-called entitlements - are omitted from the chart. Medicare, Social Security, and reimbursements to states for social services are not shown on these charts. Those items constitute more than half of Federal spending - that's where your tax dollars go - but they're completely omitted in this analysis.
my hunch it was outsourced to India (Score:2)
it wasn't (Score:2)
The Domain (Score:2)
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"most revolutionary things - - all of history"
Somehow, I don't think the internet is nearly so revolutionary a thing as something like the Magna Charta, or the US constitution, or even the abolition of slavery. Given some time, I might prepare a full list of the "most revolutionary things" in history. The intartubez might make it onto that list - maybe between pages 5 and 10. Hell, public education ranks higher, as screwed up as that is!
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Certainly any real problem, no matter how minor, is more important than a non-existant problem you just made up, right?
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How's that *any* different than now? See, what I see is people crying and whining that we shouldn't have any form of government/universal health coverage (even a 'basic' health plan, which could then be supplemented by private insurance, or if you prefer, completely opt out of the public program and buy fully private healthcare), because you make the claim that resources are finite, so therefor, someone's gonna die because the government decides it's 'not worth paying for'.
How exactly, do private health ins
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Google doesn't offer much on "policy suit". I added the term "insurance", and fared little better. Maybe I need a more obscure term?
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There is not such thing as a 'policy suit', you loon.
You can, in theory, sue an insurance company if they fail to cover a procedure and you can demonstrate they should have covered it under their policy.
But a) that's going to be very hard and expensive to do, and b) won't stop them from ending your policy with them, it would just make them pay for expenses you incurred before they kicked you off their insurance rolls.
I.e., if you appear to have lung cancer, and they refuse to test you, and you go and pay
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Once a policy commitment is made, they don't have a choice but to cover you, barring negligent activity, which is a high bar.
By 'high bar', I suspect you mean 'They'll suddenly discover the fact you didn't report a sinus infection when you were twelve and cancel your policy for that'.
They can fiddle with policy terms, but you can sue them and most likely win in most environments.
Man, in your universe filing lawsuits must be in an incredibly easy thing. You're filing 'policy suits' here and 'suits' the
You should read the news now and then (Score:2)
Try Google News for "recission" - it's quite easy for health insurance companies to rescind your coverage for any reason or no reason at all (although it's almost always couched in terms of a pre-existing condition that you failed to disclose). And frequently, when signing up for insurance, you waive your rights to a trial, agreeing in advance to go to arbitration - with an arbitration company that's picked and paid for by... your health insurance company. Surprisingly, these arbitration outfits find for th
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Yes, because the current system of "Sorry, the procedure recommended by your doctor was not deemed appropriate by Accountant #24 of your health insurance. We wish you luck with your blocked arteries. The procedure would result in more payout from us than we can recoup from you. Oh, and we can't renew your insurance for next year if you still live. Cheerios!"
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If only laws existed that required insurance companies to adhere to the terms of their policies. States should set up 'Departments of Insurance' to audit compliance. I'm going to write my Senator... After I invent a time machine or find some other way to go back 50 years into the past. Stay tuned!
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So tell me, how much transparency do you get from your insurance company?
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I've yet to see an itemized bill from the IRS.
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Snake-bummers? Asp-enders? You could just say "asshole". This is slashdot; we don't have censorship here.
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