I’m having MRIs done on my hips because the soft tissue in my hip joints has turned to shit and the doctors need to see exactly how shitty it is to figure out what they can do about it.
I was referred by my doctor to a Shields Health facility for the MRI. Today Shields sent me the forms I need to fill out online in advance of the procedure. The online forms, which is apparently built and maintained by RadNet Management, supposedly include an estimate of what my out-of-pocket costs will be. Here is what it says:
Obviously, the actual cost of the MRIs is not zero, and my actual coinsurance cost is not 123.19% of the cost of service.
So, because I don’t actually want to fill out and consent to paperwork which is completely wrong like this, I call Shields and ask them to fix it.
“We can’t fix it,” they inform me. “That information is populated by an automated system and we can’t change any of it.”
Building this shitty automated system was a choice. Failing to do proper QA on it was a choice. Failing to acknowledge and fix problems with it was a choice. All of these are bad choices. Both Shields Health and RadNet Management could make different choices at any time, but instead they apparently think it’s better to just shrug their shoulders and wave away all responsibility with, “That’s just the computer being funny, don’t worry about it.”
Well, I am worried about it. I am worried about the fact that we encounter bits and pieces of micro-shittiness all day, every day, because people don’t care about the quality of their work, people don’t take responsibility for fixing things that are broken, and people don’t think any of it matters, even though it does, very much, actually.
