I worked for many years in healthcare. Healthcare regulations are onerous, to say the least. I don't know if they're more or less onerous than banking regulations, but I even though I've never worked in banking, I'm at least aware that banking probably challenges healthcare and aviation as some of the most heavily regulated sectors. All that is to say that my healthcare company, a regional hospital system with >$10 billion revenue and about 20,000 employees, made sure EVERY GODDAM PERSON FROM THE CEO TO THE JANITORS was aware of the communications retention policy. When they wanted to make a change to that policy, they would give everyone several months of warning and an uncountable number of reminders that the policy was set to change in the weeks and months leading to such change. To say that you think you might have had a policy but the policy was more or less "sometimes we delete stuff and I swear at some point I told my lawyer about it even though I, ironically, don't have a copy of that" is, I think, one of the most damning things I've read in this whole saga, which is of course filled with lots upon lots of damning things. I think Lopatto, brutal as she is, is actually underselling how fucked up this is.
I'm certain there's absolutely nothing nefarious about organizing your business via 538 Signal chats with auto-delete times between 30 minutes and 4 weeks Counterpoint 1 Providence (120,000 employees, $27b in yearly revenue) just up'n'decided one day that they were closing our local labor & delivery department. Sent out a memo Thursday night, effective the following Friday afternoon. Their justification? There was a nursing shortage because nurses were collectively sick of everyone's antivax won't-wear-a-mask bullshit and had retired en masse, so Providence was having to cover pretty much everywhere with travel nurses, and travel nurses cost about 2.5x as much as staff nurses (and do awesome shit like write "crack addict" in the chart notes of patients they don't like, particularly if they're black - true story!). This mattered to us because we transport to that labor & delivery department with dreary regularity (especially during COVID - we lost more than half our births last month to pre-eclampsia). So we followed developments closely. It went a li'l sumpin' like this: - Thursday afternoon: memo goes out - Thursday evening: gossip network gets ahold of it - Friday morning: Facebook groups get ahold of it - Monday morning: regional paper publishes that the labor and delivery department is closing - Monday afternoon: hospital district writes a pointed memo to Providence reminding them that they don't own the hospital, they operate it for a fee, that their fee includes certain fundamental requirements and if they don't meet them they're on the hook for six figure daily fines - Monday evening: Providence rescinds their decision Now - you would think a hospital group with 51 freaking hospitals would have a sense that they don't get to just randomly close departments at public hospitals. I mean, if we "fire" a patient (for not showing up to care, for not paying, for not heeding medical advice, etc) we have to send them a certified letter with signature informing them of our decision, give them a list of alternative providers and still be their physician of record for any and all concerns and complaints for 30 calendar days upon receipt of that letter. But this whole medical group - with a CEO, lawyers and everything - just YOLO'd their way into cuts. COUNTERPOINT 2 There's this Amazon bitch. She decided that birth could be done better so she talked Amazon into giving her about $30m. She set up a facility and hired about four dozen people to basically middleware between patients and doctors. She overpaid all of them; it was a sweet gig for the nine months it lasted because they didn't quite make any waves so one fine day they just shut their fucking doors. Not so much as a Facebook post. No "here's where you can continue your care" nothing (probably because they weren't technically providing care anyway). The next thing they did was pivoted into middle-waring between providers and insurance companies through some really shady EIN manipulation, for which some dumb fucks gave them another $25m. They bought an EHR (and fucked it up), and their principle pathway appears to be "hire our biller" because she's the only person they know who actually knows how to do any of this stuff (she doesn't, it's illegal). So how much of that $25m are they going to give her? None. they're offering her stock. I think there's logic? There's reason? And then there's anything venture capital or private equity touches. Just Saturday the Atlantic had something to say about that. Shit has just gotten shadier, dawg. They all need to burn.All that is to say that my healthcare company, a regional hospital system with >$10 billion revenue and about 20,000 employees, made sure EVERY GODDAM PERSON FROM THE CEO TO THE JANITORS was aware of the communications retention policy.