A breast cancer surgeon had to “scrub out mid-surgery” to call a UnitedHealthcare representative because the insurance giant questioned whether the procedure she was in the middle of performing was really necessary.
Dr. Elisabeth Potter posted her story to Instagram this week, and the post has gotten more than 221,000 likes.
Still wearing her scrub cap, Dr. Potter began her video saying, “It’s 2025, and navigating insurance has somehow just gotten worse.”
There was one single doctor in a fifty mile radius who would deliver my youngest because UHC. Had there been zero, we could’ve gone to anyone and they’d have had to cover it, but because there was one provider, we had to use him.
It reminds me of enshittification, in that the end product involves both regular people and businesses customers being fucked over (but the regular people are fucked over worse/for long). In this analogy, the doctors are the business customers. Enshittification doesn’t apply here though, because this system has always been shitty for everyone, even if it’s getting worse. If this scenario “rhymes” with enshittification, it’s just because they both are based on capitalism being toxic
Well, if enshittification is understood as “making it more shitty” rather than “turning it into shit”, then it’s perfectly possible to further enshittify that which is already shit.
Personally I favour the latter definition since otherwise we would need another word for “making a shitty thing even worse”.
Yeah, I do agree with you. However I do like Doctorow’s pithy, 3 step formulation, which lends itself to the stricter definition. But he does also say that he may have coined it, but it’s not his word, so go nuts
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Yeah, it does make sense that if Enshittification is being used as the name of a process, it’s interpreted as a state transition - hence from non-shit to shit - rather than an increase of something.
Ultimatelly this is such a new word that, IMHO, we don’t really know how people will end up be using it in general.