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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

#91

Post by stephenr »

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…

If you had government mandated "socialised" health care like the majority of the developed world, the actual cost to provide health care would have been nowhere near as much.

I cannot fathom that people accept "12 to 18 $K" as a reasonable amount of money for health care.

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

#92

Post by pg »

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…

"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."

Did he say that?

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

#93

Post by ngpio »

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…

> There's just no way spending a million dollars to raise a fetus up to the age of zero passes any kind of cost-benefit analysis. The cost of replacing the thing is much, much lower.

Second-order emotional (and nth-order social and monetary) costs are part of a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis.

The cost of even thinking in terms of "replacing the thing" is predominantly the cost of complete societal ostracism.

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

#94

Post by thaumasiotes »

alexjeffrey wrote: post #70
thaumasiotes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

This depends on how much I need $100K (odds are I can pull this together if I'm attached to the child), and, crucially, on the age of the child. I place essentially no value on a child at negative eighteen weeks old.

I mean, would you personally pay a million dollars to save my child? I'm no more attached to a new nonviable fetus than you are to my (imaginary) 11-year-old.

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

#95

Post by tommorris »

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?!"

The point about "won't someone please think of the children?" is that its usually uttered when something that doesn't affect children is going on.

It's a demand that society fight a bogeyman that poses no real threat to children: Sonic the Hedgehog or communists or "gay propaganda" or saucy pop videos.

Asking that one's health insurance cover the delivery of one's baby seems a pretty legitimate demand.

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

#96

Post by shasta »

ForHackernews wrote: post #64
thaumasiotes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really understand how anyone can lump a real child with whom you have years of shared experiences, who you've loved and taught and who has a personality of its own in with a lump of cells that's yet to have a coherent thought.

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

#97

Post by a3n »

therobot24 wrote: post #63
ivraatiems wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'

I think the writer can be forgiven for laying it on thick, since the writer is the mother of one of those distressed babies.

And I think it's very useful for our empathy muscles to occasionally listen to "biased" people like this mother.

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

#98

Post by fiatmoney »

If your company cannot afford to pay $1M insurance claims, you shouldn't be in the business of insuring medical coverage. You should be re-insuring that risk. There are many companies that will be happy to do this for you.

The fact that apparently AOL is on the hook for medical claims by its employees indicates they've made a reasoned judgement that their risk pool is diverse enough that it's worthwhile to self-insure, or they're incompetent.

Either way, it's crazy to set yourself up as an insurer and then complain about having to pay claims. That's kind of the point.

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

#99

Post by ameister14 »

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…

The thing is, children's medical care as a whole is not relatively expensive. Elderly care is.

This kind of event is super rare. However,it's not nearly so rare to have an older person go through tons of procedures and spend months in the hospital.

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

#100

Post by gaius »

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…

This is called triage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage

It's difficult to discuss these things as people tend to get emotionally involved, but be discussed they must.

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