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Aetna's CEO pays workers up to $500 to sleep

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Re: Aetna's CEO pays workers up to $500 to sleep

#4
post #3

Seems like a PR move more than anything else. I'm tired of hearing about all of these weird benefits. How about just an awesome place to work that pays well?

Weird benefits are a result of employers trying to incentivize their workers to behave in certain ways.

Re: Aetna's CEO pays workers up to $500 to sleep

#7
I hate insurance companies. For one, they refused to pay for pre-approved claims when my wife had cancer and was being treated at Stanford (We were double-insured. Apparently, when you have two insurances, it is common for carriers to decline payments in the hope that the other insurance will pay it.) So my wife couldn't get out of bed and we literally had a stack of unpaid bills over a foot high and totaling over a half-million dollars.

Another reason to hate them is what I learned from consulting for insurance companies. I've been told first-hand stories by claims-adjusters about how the fax machine is intentionally put on the other side of their building and the CEO's assistant goes by and throws out all the papers. (The have the sense not to question why that is done.) And they discover that anyone paying too many legitimate claims gets fired. And their doctor's "reviews" only exist to look for people who might die and have the family resources to sue, and to decline legitimate claims so that enough people give up on their insurance claims. They cry when telling these stories.

Addendum: My wife lived - but the experience was more horrible than I have words to describe. And I'm fortunate that I could afford to hire a consultant to work with the insurance company billing. It took 2 years, but we got most of it paid. I eventually wrote a check for a few thousand dollars to try to undo the damage to my credit report. To this day, I'm not sure why I had to pay that money and why it took two years when I had "great" insurance through two companies.

Re: Aetna's CEO pays workers up to $500 to sleep

#8
Mark seemed to have the conversation under control with all questions being fired off.

From the ~500 datapoints i have regarding my sleep from sleepcycle I would also say that sleep plays a large factor in how I can perform in my school tasks. Now at around 7 hours of sleep, Ill land to a "~70% sleep quality". At that point, I am able to perform the task in class, with little feelings of distractions, drowsiness. etc.

Re: Aetna's CEO pays workers up to $500 to sleep

#9
post #3

Seems like a PR move more than anything else. I'm tired of hearing about all of these weird benefits. How about just an awesome place to work that pays well?

If it's a PR move then they think the public they're relating to is dumb as hell because they're giving $500 to their employees instead of paying out the legitimate claims they're supposed to, causing doctors to drop them en masse while the customers left stuck with them have no place to get proper medical service.

Re: Aetna's CEO pays workers up to $500 to sleep

#10

Do you have to get all 20 days of 7+ hours of sleep in a row with no screw-ups? If so, seems rather unlikely to happen!

The article is poorly phrased -- I believe the "in a row" applies to (7+ hours of sleep) instead of (20 days of 7+ hours of sleep).

In other words, just the seven hours of sleep has to be contiguous?

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