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...

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.”

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    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”.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      6 hours ago

      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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      “Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. […] But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.” [1]

      1. 1 ↩︎

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        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.