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

cnbc.com

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

#21

Post by epicureanideal »

artursapek wrote: post #14
MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

Two years ago my wife and I were unable to get Aetna to pay for a home birth, even though we got it approved ahead of time. After months of futile phone calls where they basically kept me on hold for 30 minutes and then told me to fuck off, what finally got them to pay up was an angry tweet I wrote. I thought it was silly, but was advised to try it as a last resort by the midwife's billing assistant. Amazingly, they…

Exactly. Make a public fuss. I had a non-medical situation in which raising a public fuss resolved the matter quite swiftly when I had no other leverage.

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

#22

Post by ma2rten »

sna1l wrote: post #17
MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

Medical insurance in the US doesn't make any sense. Insurance is supposed to be a hedge against a large risk, but in the US we use our medical insurance to pay for common visits and prescriptions. Everyone is so used to this model that it doesn't seem weird. Imagine if you used your car insurance to pay for gas. That would be ludicrous. No other "insurance" is handled in this manner.

Car insurance is worse actually. In the US if you have an accident with bodily injury the settlement can go in the millions, but the legal limit for car insurance is as low as 20k. They do the opposite of what insurance should do, hedge against a small risk and leave you unprotected from big risks.

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

#23

Post by atomical »

artursapek wrote: post #14
MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

Two years ago my wife and I were unable to get Aetna to pay for a home birth, even though we got it approved ahead of time. After months of futile phone calls where they basically kept me on hold for 30 minutes and then told me to fuck off, what finally got them to pay up was an angry tweet I wrote. I thought it was silly, but was advised to try it as a last resort by the midwife's billing assistant. Amazingly, they…

Another thing that works is finding the format for e-mail addresses at the company and then searching LinkedIn for employees. Then use the Reply All button after you CC the whole company. If they don't respond it means that they didn't get the e-mail. Keep trying.

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

#24

Post by atomical »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #13
voodootrucker wrote: post #5

This seems like a creepy overreach into personal matters that's bound to continue, and likely end badly.

I'm curious how you see a voluntary program to pay employees to do something they should be doing anyway is creepy and/or overreach?

Voluntary work from home policy (required for work from home): We can visit and photograph your desk at home any time we want.

I have seen contracts like this and it's becoming more and more popular.

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

#25

Post by ralmidani »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #13
voodootrucker wrote: post #5

This seems like a creepy overreach into personal matters that's bound to continue, and likely end badly.

I'm curious how you see a voluntary program to pay employees to do something they should be doing anyway is creepy and/or overreach?

The program being voluntary does not make it un-creepy to use devices which track what an employee is doing at home.

Many people use non-free software and devices which can (and often do) spy on them. It's voluntary, but the spying is still creepy.

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

#26

Post by bobbyi_settv »

sna1l wrote: post #17
MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

Medical insurance in the US doesn't make any sense. Insurance is supposed to be a hedge against a large risk, but in the US we use our medical insurance to pay for common visits and prescriptions. Everyone is so used to this model that it doesn't seem weird. Imagine if you used your car insurance to pay for gas. That would be ludicrous. No other "insurance" is handled in this manner.

> Imagine if you used your car insurance to pay for gas. That would be ludicrous.

That's not ludicrous enough for me. Can the insurance be provided through my employer so that I'll need different insurance to pay for my gas if I switch jobs?

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

#27

Post by thefrostytruth »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #13
voodootrucker wrote: post #5

This seems like a creepy overreach into personal matters that's bound to continue, and likely end badly.

I'm curious how you see a voluntary program to pay employees to do something they should be doing anyway is creepy and/or overreach?

I understand that it's voluntary, but the company has literally followed its employee into the bedroom, via remote sensor.

It's easy to see how that might be unsettling to some, even to suggest, "hey, wear this leash on your off hours, and I'll give you extra money."

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

#28

Post by tikhonj »

sna1l wrote: post #17
MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

Medical insurance in the US doesn't make any sense. Insurance is supposed to be a hedge against a large risk, but in the US we use our medical insurance to pay for common visits and prescriptions. Everyone is so used to this model that it doesn't seem weird. Imagine if you used your car insurance to pay for gas. That would be ludicrous. No other "insurance" is handled in this manner.

That's the thing: medical insurance in the US is a weird hybrid between actual insurance and a complicated web of collective purchasing agreements. They let large organizations, companies and even individuals to get together by proxy to get bulk discounts on health costs.

You can see why this second function might be useful, although it also does weird things to the market. But it feels like it should be fundamentally distinct from insurance against risk. Having both functions in one line-item just makes everything more complex and confusing.

It also makes sense because medical insurance is a special channel for companies to give additional compensation to their workers. I've heard this originated from salary caps during WWII—turns out that if you try to ham-fistedly control the markets, you'll get weird ripple effects. If you're just channeling money to your employees, paying for their routine expenses makes sense especially since people can appreciate immediate benefits like that a lot more than the abstract benefit of having a low-probability risk hedged for you.

If you were actually going to design a system for managing health care from the ground up in the US, this is absolutely not what you would come up with. It's hideous legacy code. And it's just as hard to update as legacy systems, with the additional barrier of politics thrown in.

It doesn't really make sense, but you can sort of trace the reasons it evolved the way it did. And it's not changing significantly any time soon.

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

#29

Post by thaumasiotes »

ma2rten wrote: post #22
sna1l wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical insurance in the US doesn't make any sense. Insurance is supposed to be a hedge against a large risk, but in the US we use our medical insurance to pay for common visits and prescriptions. Everyone is so used to this model that it doesn't seem weird. Imagine if you used your car insurance to pay for gas. That would be ludicrous. No other "insurance" is handled in this manner.

Car insurance is worse actually. In the US if you have an accident with bodily injury the settlement can go in the millions, but the legal limit for car insurance is as low as 20k. They do the opposite of what insurance should do, hedge against a small risk and leave you unprotected from big risks.

> They do the opposite of what insurance should do

There are a couple of points you seem to be missing:

- This insurance works precisely as you say it should, but on a lower scale. In exchange for a fee, it protects you, the holder, from losses too large to easily absorb. If those losses aren't too large for you to absorb, you can post a bond instead of having insurance.

- You don't have car insurance for your own benefit. You have it for everyone else's benefit (that's why you're required to have it). It doesn't matter if you get wiped out by the fines resulting from an accident because that's not why you have insurance. The point of your insurance is to make sure that the parties you injure can recover something. The legal limit is therefore set at an appropriate level for that goal. If you want insurance that protects you at a higher level than that, you can easily purchase some with a higher cap.

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

#30

Post by thaumasiotes »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #19
MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

Medical insurance in the US is absurdly corrupt. Fun fact, health insurance companies are exempt from most anti-trust laws. Health insurance companies are free to collude on price and split up states between each other to limit competition.

> Health insurance companies are free to [...] split up states between each other to limit competition.

Aren't health insurance companies legally prohibited from operating in more than a single state?

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