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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

#61

Post by pjc50 »

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…

.. and in the universal-healthcare UK, my brother survived being 12 weeks premature.

Do you have a cite for the French system, specifically that withdrawal of care in NICU? English or French will be fine.

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

#62

Post by tarr11 »

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…

It is unfortunate that Tim Armstrong made these statements and all of us who have had this experience need to relive it.

My daughter also had an extraordinary birth, and was saved by the incredibly expert care of a dedicated team of medical professionals at multiple hospitals in Seattle and Bellevue. The bill I saw was north of 250K and I paid the max of that (which was a few thousand)

It occurred while I was at a startup which i had co-founded (and currently employs over 100 people). I tend to go from startup to startup, with some contract / FTE work in between, and have swung from COBRA to COBRA to keep my health insurance consistent.

Because of ACA, this is the first year that I didn't have to "get a real job" in order to keep pursuing startups.

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

#63

Post by therobot24 »

ivraatiems wrote: post #10
therobot24 wrote: post #5

Armstrong's quotes are quite deplorable and the backpedaling is cringe-worthy but all i could think of while reading the article is Mrs. Lovejoy from the simpsons, "Won't somebody think of the children?!"

Because somebody should think of the children. And the geriatric. And the disabled. Part of the point of having a developed society with a developed healthcare system is using it to sustain people who can't sustain themselves. I think this article isn't important because one person happened to say something rude about somebody's daughter. It's important because it's a peek into how a lot of people are actually thinki…

not disagreeing with anything here, nor did i in the previous post, merely a light anecdote relating to how thick the writer is 'laying it on'

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

#64

Post by ForHackernews »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #45
fennecfoxen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we think microeconomics for a moment: healthcare for distressed infants could be a textbook example of inelastic demand. Q: How much are you willing to pay to save the life of this child? A: ALL THE MONEY! AND MORE!!

People are a little more willing to spend someone else's money on less-than-worthwhile pursuits than they are to spend their own. As long as the customers aren't bearing the cost, everything they buy will have a similarly inelastic demand. Healthcare for distressed infants is certainly not an example of inelastic demand where people have to pay for it themselves; even food for healthy infants (a much smaller, and muc…

> Healthcare for distressed infants is certainly not an example of inelastic demand where people have to pay for it themselves

Are you kidding me? If it was a question of saving my child's life, I'd spend every last cent I had and then go sell a kidney.

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

#65

Post by 300bps »

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/...

Those statistics aren't exactly Apples to Apples between countries. There are just too many ways countries can cheat.

For instance, some countries (like France) ignore births before x weeks whereas most countries (including the U.S.) include all births.

Beyond that, the U.S. leads the world in premature birth survival despite also leading the world in assisting people with fertility problems to become pregnant and add to the statistics that on the surface seem problematic for the U.S.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm

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

#66

Post by ryguytilidie »

nilsbunger wrote: post #29

AOL could've chosen a 3rd party insurance company instead of self-insuring. Self-insuring was probably a decision intended to save money compared to getting an external health provider. The CEO could conclude that these outlier events create too much unpredictability for the bottom line, and thus move the company to an external healthcare provider. Heck, they could even fire the CFO or whoever made the cost-benefit a…

Thats the real shocking part here. AOL made a poor business decision, paid for it, and the CEO, the very person in charge of business decisions, blames medical complications from a fucking baby. It is absolutely unfathomably terrible from a quality human being perspective.

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

#67

Post by smoyer »

An amazing, baring article that brought back too many memories (our first son was early and classified "distressed", though not nearly to this degree). I'm glad to see she's doing so well, and I really have to wonder why pay health insurance premiums (that claim to cover this sort of catastrophic event), if you can't cash in on that policy should you ever need to (all the while praying that you don't).

It's not like CEOs of large companies are selected for being empathetic, but in this case I'll predict that he doesn't survive the publicity surrounding his statements. Children are (and should be) important to a civilized society regardless of their present capabilities or future expectations.

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

#68

Post by lutusp »

jbapple wrote: post #43
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…

> (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 the bills, this is what insurance is for, etc.). Could you explain more about how self insuring works?

> Could you explain more about how self insuring works?

In normal insurance, the policy payments go into an investment pool that benefits the corporation's stockholders. In self-insurance, the set-aside funds go into an investment pool that benefits you (or your company).

The drawback to self-insurance are outlier claims that can more than wipe out the set-aside (as in the case under discussion). Obviously an insurance corporation has (or should have) a larger pool to deal with outliers than an individual or small company.

This is not to say that big insurance companies aren't sometimes wiped out by a sudden unexpected uptick in legitimate claims. In that case, the company may simply declare bankruptcy and the policy holders are left out in the cold -- just as though they had self-insured. But that's a rare occurrence.

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

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

#69

Post by masklinn »

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…

> in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes

Do you have any source for these claims?

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

#70

Post by alexjeffrey »

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…

You place more importance on $1M than on a human life? What if it was your child, would you be doing a cost/benefit analysis and turning to your wife and saying "sorry honey, it will cost more than $100,000 to save our child. might as well get her put down"?
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