To be fair, she didn't actually say she had been working from home online since the 90's, just that "Working from home as a medical transcriptionist or medical billing has been commonplace since the late 1990s." She herself apparently only did it for that year in 2001. Also the treatment for her cancer likely took much more than a year but she was only able to work for a year due to the treatment.
Since HIPAA was enacted in 1996, there would have to be a lot more security on a home computer than simply Norton or McAfee. Someone would have to pay for that regardless if they were working as an employee or independent contractor. The rest of the post is a bit confusing as there is no real time line given as to when the VPN was added.
Yes, I'd agree that you'd want the computing equivalent of a total police state, making "distance worker" accommodation difficult.
Those sentences which "A" had set in the present tense I took to mean "present day". I don't find it useful to read too much into the past tense sentences. To say working from home has been "commonplace" is plausible, since that is not saying that the practice was widespread or that anyone in teal scrubs with an HP Pavilion could do the job unsupervised. I don't think the remarks were meant to dilute the warning topic of this thread.
+2
CroneD
She may be a phony, but I do remember taking courses in Medical Transcription in the '80s and interviewing for a job from a private supplier near where I lived which wasn't much different from doing it at home. The Chinese female supplier had about 20 poorly lighted claustrophobic spaces with computers. Thankfully, I wasn't hired.
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