Effectively, this is government-mandated bundling. Now you must buy the extra service when taking a flight, whether you require it or not.
HN user
byecancer21
throwaway for medical privacy reasons.
The German state is also helping public health insurers hide their dirty secret: in hundreds of thousands of cases, denials were legally flawed and the cases have to be reviewed. They refuse to do so on the behest of politics as a small number of cases will turn out to be intentionally negligent homicides caused by public officials.
A site properly presenting the facts is due for launch in the lead up to Germany's upcoming federal election. Until then, you can find a teaser here:
Any claim related to outpatient treatment which outside the ordinary requires prior approval there. You cannot opt to pay in advance and seek reimbursement later.
In the state of Bavaria the doctors at a government agency have been practicing without a medical license going back many years because their supervisor let this slide. I discovered her problem randomly in the course of litigation and it impacts probably a million case.
The person responsible for her staff of hundreds lacking a current medical license was later hired to lead the qualifications department at the medical board. That is, after I got her fired from her position and then from a job at a hospital (a felonious psychologist is unacceptable risk for patients). Politics would prefer to see her problem covered up.
AF also tried to pull the codeshare thing with me once. Didn't want to go around in circles with customer service and found it easier to initiate litigation. AF then hired a big law firm to defend the tiny case.
A week before a scheduled court hearing their lawyer calls me to negotiate. I tell her there is nothing to negotiate about, and she agrees. We chat for an hour anyway which was surely billed to her client AF. I receive full payment two days later.
Haven't booked an AF flight since.
One way to think about this: as a founder you charge your seed investors, whose capital you deploy, say 85% (preferences notwithstanding). Why wouldn't you do it all on your own and retain 100%? Capital inflow is a multiplier for your efforts, sometimes a gatekeeper too.
My rate for private health insurance in Germany is nearly 9.6k EUR/yr, not including family.
This is a contract so terms can vary. Here: zero deductible, vision and dental included, international coverage including US. Includes a savings-like provision required by law. It is designed to keep rates affordable over time.
This mirrors my personal experience. To make a treatment decision, against the advice of my local doctors, that was key to survival I relied on US research.
To compare costs: For an extremely rare cancer, total cost of treatment was 100k EUR in Germany, whereas US patients report case costs of >2m USD.
Part of these savings stem from the public healthcare system not providing adequate treatment, while strictly necessary for a reasonable chance of survival in this case. What happens in Germany then is the amazing doctors do stuff anyway (if you can convince them), bill whatever they can, and write off the remainder. Profits from privately insured patients make up for this shortfall here.
Public healthcare being adequate is somewhat of a myth, for Germany at least.
I appreciate the offer. Otherwise I did have a superb experience with the medical system, that is real doctors not state workers with lapsed qualification.
I have nothing personally against the guy, responding to personal asks for a favor is inappropriate but simply how such things work.
This is simply a means to achieve the strictly necessary: to have two criminal offenders amongst judges removed from their appointments. Realistically this only happens if the prosecutors, which are directed by state politicians and are not independent, look bad to the public unless they handle the matter properly.
And that I do care very much about.
Thank you for your wishes. For future needs I was able to return to private health insurance which suffers from no such problem. However this cannot cover claims arisen prior to policy issue, so the subject matter remains open.
No judge ruling in this court actually has public health insurance.
This has realistically no more than a 10-15% chance of succeeding, not dissimilar to a startup. For either, it is perhaps better to not get attached too much to a specific outcome.
Consider I had just survived a rare cancer that kills nearly everyone who gets it quickly, then when addressing a serious side effect from treatment this happens.
Not claiming any moral high ground here. Many would descend into anger and despair or feelings of victimhood, I simply made a choice to play this like a game instead.
I appreciate your concern.
Her own staffer did ask me some time ago, unprompted, if she too must fear criminal charges. There exists proof of this.
I do feel bad for her and even the judge's superior, the court president, who I believe failed to take action not because she couldn't recognize the problem but because this judge wields more power than her boss.
Finally, some documents have been designated a state secret because public knowledge would be disadvantageous to the state, something I can agree with. These were circulated before I could interpret the acronyms thus outside my control now.
Note I did nothing to manipulate the top court. The application was phrased politely and only hinted at a crime background.
Severe procedural errors including denial of access to court files alone justified a reversal, besides the blatant misinterpretation of the law. There was no need to argue beyond this point or label anyone an offender at the time.
(Ordinarily one would have filed to have the decision voided locally instead of applying to the top court, but that court had unlawfully denied access to the assignment rules and does to this day.)
Not being able to tell if the facts are true I see why one might be inclined to think as much. I did discuss the matter with friends throughout the course of events to assure my own sanity however, also because certain aspects are in our view rather entertaining.
A future matter is the health data protection violation the judge's family committed by hiring problem solving consultants first and giving them my personal info, prior to escalating to a false threat claim.
Interestingly the law assigns such cases to her branch of the judiciary.
So this judge might soon become a witness or even defendant at her very own court, in a matter directed against her actions.
I will grant you this sounds crazy on the face of it. It is the law however (SGB X).
To clarify, the "way out" was simply a new filing for an interim order based on the novel fact that a potentially lethal complication had just occurred in connection with the case. I substantiated this with medical and research evidence.
This was a very simple thing for her to grant, and in my view she was required to do so based on constitutional principles.
I would more likely than not have let the previous incident slide. Why she did not take this opportunity I have no idea.
The judge felt safe to commit an overt serious crime due to her husband. He is the conditio sine qua non without which this the entire matter had not happened.
He could make a choice. Either talk to me or influence the court. The choice he ended up making is quite clear. Of course I could not point out his options, as that no doubt would have been misconstrued.
There is some evidence suggesting the cases at the court don't get assigned randomly, as per the rules, and she might ask for off-label use cases to get preferentially assigned to herself.
Upon an inquiry the court did not deny this is true. To find the truth one would have to verify the sequence of other case assignments, which should be possible from incoming filing times and such. Here a second case got assigned to her but with a sequence number oddly enough belonging to a different chamber. Per the law there was supposed to be a singular number, and for some reason she split the case without a required decision.
She is also the only judge at this court who ever wrote anything public on the topic.
Due to an adventurous recent personal medical history I became well-aware what problems unlawful denials do cause for patients.
I did not ask her or any judge to resign. This was a proposal to the prosecutor's office prior to filing any of the serious charges and triggering certain events then required from them by law.
Unlike public officials I was fully within my rights to first seek a more politically tenable solution.
There is no doubt everyone involved is fully aware of the situation, although people won't admit to it.
Honestly not so sure. This appears to be a fairly corrupt nation as a baseline so many may find this matter not all that surprising. His appointment a few years ago was controversial within legal circles.
Unlike SCOTUS, Constitutional Court here is by law not entirely at liberty whether to take a case but who gets to interpret the statute. Of course it will be claimed this court can do however it wishes.
To fully convince the public the course of this case was far outside the norm certain data from this court will be helpful, which of course they refused to release voluntarily and the federal data protection authority, meant to enforce something similar to FOIA, claimed to have dropped a matter due to clerical error. This might suggest the matter is already a known political problem at the federal level, but one can only guess. Strangely enough, getting the info will ultimately involve suing the top court (administration) in a lower court.
One thing to keep in mind is that this nation is one without genuine separation of powers. Any matter ends up being citizen versus the state, not citizen invoking one part of the state to check on the power of another part.
This was a fun thing sent three days before the election, which his party was expected to lose. The same judge was vice-leader of this party until his appointment and is known to be ultra-catholic.
Such writing is obviously not directed at him but rather at his staffers. At the lower courts the same tactic actually worked to change staff willingness to make themselves an accessory to crimes. An interesting consequence is later decision were not served correctly because no staffer wanted to put any identifying information on there anymore – this is however a legal requirement for certified copies.
Note I am not actually accusing the top judge of a crime but merely of inappropriate bias.
I am well aware it is important to convey the events in manner understandable to the general public. This has not occurred yet as I had no immediate plan to go public. Before HN the site was only known to a small circle of lawyers.
I expect all cases are going to be retried.
As a criminal defense strategy the judge made a claim she "felt threatened" for an extremely long duration including all of her decisions. I have thus filed for nullification, since her claim implies judicial bias.
This matter is currently pending.
I wanted to complete legal proceedings first. A late-night post in a half-day old thread on HN is getting orders of magnitudes more visits than I had thought.
You interpret this as an ultimatum, I see offering them a way out as being nice. At the same time one has to assert seeing through obvious b-s.
What is appropriate gets decided by lawmakers not judges.
Once judges willfully violate the code they have stepped outside their assigned role. This quickly became more of a political problem than a legal one, and what is right is ultimately for voters to decide.
Whether I am able to interpret the code and precedent correctly we will see. I did score close to the very top when taking the LSAT however.
Different standards apply for judges within proceedings, especially those making decisions at the very top.
I did offer each offender a second chance, as I thought they might have learned from this. They chose not to take it.
The first instance judge had been given four chances even.
I did consider this and protected myself by letting the judges know in a side letter about some background.
Obviously would not have pursued this matter if I wasn't a fairly well-connected person and Covid-19 restrictions made available the time to do so.
The veracity of the case can be trivially verified as I filed nearly everything electronically thus have receipts with digital signatures. A singular court decision was also served digitally because an enraged judge wanted it served instantly right after an ex-parte phone call didn't go the way he had thought.
For clarification, evidence for the bribery claim is only circumstantial at this point, which is also made clear in the record. The other claims however are substantiated with strong evidence encompassing intent.
Sorry, this is unexpectedly blowing up. Had wrongly assumed few people would care about the matter.
Should be back up soon with Cloudflare caching.
I don't believe or have claimed this will "change history".
Had in fact offered to let the whole matter slide if and only if two judges ruling on health insurance matters hand in their resignations, as I consider them a danger to the general public.
https://de.wickepedia.org/File:20210328-rittweger.cover.reda...
The resolution some months later:
https://de.wickepedia.org/File:20211014-lsg-wicke-cover.pdf
The court was unable to print pages due to a css media selector preventing this, so the - presumably bribed - judge had them printed at the nearby law offices of the influential husband. This showed up in log files with his IP address, and can likely be proven as the color printouts of screenshots have forensic features connecting them with his printer.
Since this leaves little doubt about an inappropriate connection to the case and possible bribery, which the prosecutor's office has a legal duty to investigate, this was considered the game over moment.
Somewhat bizarrely, the judge then claimed she felt threatened by this chess game. However, the queen actually remains standing at the end of the game.
The medical reviewer, a public employee, had ruled on a matter she was not professionally qualified for.
The court asked the patient's doctor for facts as they routinely do, which left no room for denial. The judge dropped this document from one file, then in another file claimed the same matter had already been decided and passed over all evidence while at the same time knowingly making a false assertion of facts.
Access to these files was denied for months, beyond the constitutional court case even.
Without the ability review the files, had to guess what she had done and this did turn out to be factual later. From judicial instructions found on the back side of a page at the appeals level it is clear these judges had been aware. The judge assigned to fact-finding had refused to handle the matter, a procedural violation.
Had asked the medical board for proof as one way to have these decisions nullified. No response for months. In a hearing that was recorded I mentioned the medical board and, carelessly, two days later they sent a letter refusing me the information. It is clear a judge is behind this. This matter is now pending in administrative court.
Well aware of the politics. The play here was to predict the ways corruption works and use their own moves against the other side.
Obstruction of justice can already be shown to have occurred within the prosecutor's office, in a case against the judge related to her faking of a crime. Police had concluded there was no threat. That page went missing from her file but I have it from another source.
A number of my friends and acquaintances are, in fact, high-level judges. This court had no way of knowing this.
Had ended up in hospital with a potentially lethal complication in connection. It won't be me going to prison.
None of the stuff published so far is writing targeted at the general public, it is directed at people involved who are aware of the details.