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That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

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Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#51

Post by rwissmann »

dlokshin wrote: post #44
ekidd wrote: post #31

I'm delighted to hear that this child is doing well, and I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I hear from an AOL recruiter. The whole point of insura…

The irony is that if we were to have a single payer or other form of universal healthcare like they do in France, this little girl likely would have died. In France they use "Statistical prognostic" approach which in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes. Edit: couldn't find data for premies at 25 weeks, but at 37 weeks and below, survival rate in the US is higher tha…

Where does this myth come from that universal healthcare systems like the European ones deny coverage for black swan events? They don't. What procedures are covered has little to do with whether the system is single payer or not.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#52

Post by spamizbad »

dlokshin wrote: post #44
ekidd wrote: post #31

I'm delighted to hear that this child is doing well, and I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I hear from an AOL recruiter. The whole point of insura…

The irony is that if we were to have a single payer or other form of universal healthcare like they do in France, this little girl likely would have died. In France they use "Statistical prognostic" approach which in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes. Edit: couldn't find data for premies at 25 weeks, but at 37 weeks and below, survival rate in the US is higher tha…

Are you sure about that? France's Infant Mortality Rate is lower than the US.

France: 3.34 US: 5.90 (Per 1000 live births)

Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#53

Post by tarr11 »

mkreef wrote: post #39

I also had a distressed baby a few years ago that spent months in the NICU of one of the best children's hospitals, had multiple surgeries, was in and out of the hospital for the first few months of his life. Ultimately an incident occurred that left him brain dead and on life support before he was 6 months old. We decided to remove life support and held him as he died in our arms. The family insurance plan offered b…

My condolences. It costs a lot, but I'm sure the costs to your family were much higher that what the insurance company paid.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#54

Post by dlokshin »

spamizbad wrote: post #52
dlokshin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that if we were to have a single payer or other form of universal healthcare like they do in France, this little girl likely would have died. In France they use "Statistical prognostic" approach which in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes. Edit: couldn't find data for premies at 25 weeks, but at 37 weeks and below, survival rate in the US is higher tha…

Are you sure about that? France's Infant Mortality Rate is lower than the US. France: 3.34 US: 5.90 (Per 1000 live births) Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

The assumption here being that a live birth is as likely in France as it is in the US. What we should be looking for is percentage of survival for infants born sub 25ish weeks or something like that (I don't have that data).

UPDATE: And as we see from this paper from the WHO, live birth in the US is not what it means in France, for example. In the US it's any sign of life, in France and Belgium it's living for some period of time: "it has also been common practice in several countries (e.g. Belgium, France, Spain) to register as live births only those infants who survived for a specified period beyond birth"

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/6/07-043471/en/

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#55

Post by stevoski »

dlokshin wrote: post #44
ekidd wrote: post #31

I'm delighted to hear that this child is doing well, and I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I hear from an AOL recruiter. The whole point of insura…

The irony is that if we were to have a single payer or other form of universal healthcare like they do in France, this little girl likely would have died. In France they use "Statistical prognostic" approach which in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes. Edit: couldn't find data for premies at 25 weeks, but at 37 weeks and below, survival rate in the US is higher tha…

Got reliable sources for that claim?

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#56

Post by bluthru »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #42
paul wrote: post #30

My daughter had a similar birth and hospital stay, which also produced a million dollar insurance bill. It costs about $10,000/day to stay in the NICU. I was never able work out why it costs so much, except that this is a major profit center for hospitals, and they use the money to cover other, money losing, departments. Fortunately Google is run by good people, and they were never anything other than supportive. I'm…

> I do think our medical system needs some rethinking though. You probaby don't want to hear it, but if I were running a medical system I'd decree that gestating one-and-a-half-pound globs (from the article: "One doctor, visibly shaken, described [the fetus's skin] as 'gelatinous'") outside the womb is a waste of resources. To me, if miscarriages aren't the end of the world, neither are "babies" that die of natural c…

I don't necessarily agree, but I don't think your opinion should be downvoted.

Consider this: We as a society have more than enough wealth to give ICU care to every infant that needs it. Our medical system is what makes it expensive.

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#57

Post by lutusp »

ItendToDisagree wrote: post #49
bigchewy wrote: post #25

Tim Armstrong has an incredible ability to say the wrong thing. The underlying topic, however, is fascinating. I do healthcare analytics for a living so I see how often a single neonatal ICU incident can consume 30% of an entire company's healthcare budget for the year (note: if you don't really understand healthcare, e.g. what self insuring means, please don't respond with comments that the insurance company pays th…

How exactly are outliers like this not "what insurance is for"? I'm curious (not arguing). I could understand that 'self insuring' is a different beast, but isn't the point of insurance in general (not just healthcare), to protect against outliers? If the company didn't put aside enough money to account for unexpected cases, such as this, arn't they just being negligent (or at the very least causing their own financi…

> the point of insurance in general (not just healthcare), to protect against outliers?

No, the point of insurance is to enrich the stockholders of the insurance company. This might sound like a leftist rant, but it's actually the singe most important thing to understand about the insurance business.

If a policy term doesn't contribute to the bottom line, it's changed to disfavor the policy holder. If a deductible amount eats too much into corporate profits, it's changed to disfavor the policy holder. These facts explain why some companies and individuals choose to self-insure.

If you buy an insurance policy, the policy's payments go into a corporate investment pool that benefits only the company's stockholders. If you self-insure, the funds you set aside to pay claims go into a personal investment pool that benefits you. For the life of me, I can't understand why more people don't know this.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/wrong/index.html#Insurance

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#58

Post by [deleted] »

dlokshin wrote: post #44
ekidd wrote: post #31

I'm delighted to hear that this child is doing well, and I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I hear from an AOL recruiter. The whole point of insura…

The irony is that if we were to have a single payer or other form of universal healthcare like they do in France, this little girl likely would have died. In France they use "Statistical prognostic" approach which in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes. Edit: couldn't find data for premies at 25 weeks, but at 37 weeks and below, survival rate in the US is higher tha…

[deleted]

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#59

Post by yummyfajitas »

ekidd wrote: post #31

I'm delighted to hear that this child is doing well, and I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I hear from an AOL recruiter. The whole point of insura…

...but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable.

It's not unacceptable according to TA. AOL insurance (pre-Obamacare) did pay for it:

"Two things that happened in 2012. We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs..."

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-07/aol-ceo-blam...

Re: That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter

#60

Post by ryguytilidie »

ekidd wrote: post #31

I'm delighted to hear that this child is doing well, and I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I hear from an AOL recruiter. The whole point of insura…

The craziest thing to me is what an utterly small drop in the bucket this is and how Tim embarrassed the entire company and their stockholders over an expense that is <1% of AOLs revenue and is less than his yearly salary. He should have been immediately fired for both insensitivity and short-sightedness to the point of incompetence.
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