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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

#171

Post by late2part »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #59
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…

I don't understand. What does Obamacare/ACA have to do with this issue?

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

#172

Post by pg »

dkural wrote: post #153
pg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

What is your interpretation Paul? What did he say? Do you think Tim did anything wrong or do you advice that Tim sticks to his guns on this one & shouldn't have caved in with that second memo?

What did he say?

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/02/8539961/...

He shouldn't have mentioned specific cases. If he felt the company had to cut elsewhere to compensate for high medical costs, he should have left it at that level of detail. But I don't see how you get from what he actually said to

  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.
Frankly, posting and upvoting that sort of comment is the behavior of a lynch mob.

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

#173

Post by fiatmoney »

lutusp wrote: post #163
a3n wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not totally, and would presumably protect against catastrophic catastrophes by spreading the meta-risk. You could make the same argument against having home or medical insurance, that it erodes the advantage of having the totality of your take home pay. But it seems responsible to have home insurance and medical insurance, and it would seem responsible for a self-insurer to reinsure.

The problem with re-insuring is it's not one thing and its not the other. The advantage of self-insurance is diminished, and the advantage of conventional insurance is diminished also. > it would seem responsible for a self-insurer to reinsure. Reinsuring is sort of like being married, and not being married, at once. Many people think that sounds pretty cool -- until they try it.

Reinsurance policies can be pretty bespoke; you could for instance get a policy that only covers you in the event that a tornado hits corporate HQ (=> driving corporate revenues down and healthcare costs up at the same time), or individual payments above a certain amount, or N% of aggregate claims above a certain level. You still preserve most of the benefits of self-insuring while protecting yourself against outliers, in the same way that you come out ahead if you skip insuring the loss of your refrigerator, but do insure the loss of your house.

The biggest issue is the principal-agent problem - it costs some amount to insure against once-every-20-year claims, and by that time the CEO is likely to be retired, so why buy the coverage?

That's one of the reasons why insurance companies per se are highly regulated.

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

#174

Post by cosmie »

kps wrote: post #141
cosmie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And to be honest, I'm surprised that his statements aren't "suable" in some form in the lawsuit happy country that is the United States of America. A friend of mine immediately pointed out to the numerous healthcare privacy laws in place; and another HN commenter pointed out on the original thread the possibility that the employees with the distressed babies would get discriminated against by their coworkers, after…

If, as some other comments say, AOL self-insures, are they a covered entity?

IANAL, most of my knowledge of HIPAA compliance comes from Business Law classes and required trainings when I worked for a healthcare/hospital system.

However, AFAIK that would make them a covered entity. As a payor, they would have direct access to their employee's medical records. Whereas under normal circumstances, the payor/insurer only provides the employer non-PHI data such as enrollment/disenrollment info and summary data (at an aggregate level) to support pricing discussions, which is why they aren't usually a covered entity. You can find a good write-up on HIPAA requirements for self-funded insurance plans here[1].

[1 - pdf] http://www.nixonpeabody.com/files/155838_Benefits_Alert_20MA...

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

#175

Post by late2part »

michaelochurch wrote: post #170

Tim Armstrong shows us directly what the upper class actually thinks of us. The mean-spirited worldview shouldn't be a surprise. What is a bit brazen is the "turn the poors on each other" behavior. Usually, it's not so obvious. He had hoped that the rank-and-file employees would, as a response to this phony scarcity (health benefits OR 401k, when the real problem is executive overcompensation) imposed from above, tur…

"shows us directly what the upper class actually thinks of us."

#1 - Tim Armstrong is an ugly man and doesn't speak for the upper class.

#2 - Many many many readers on HN are upper class.

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

#176

Post by anigbrowl »

mindcrime wrote: post #149
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 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 Do you really think it's possible to have a comprehensive understanding of "Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children" based on this one little blurb? I mean, seriously... I can't help but think people are constructing a caricature of the…

He chose to make it specific, rather than just saying 'employee medical insurance costs were higher than expected.' By using the specific medical problems of two families to cast management in a positive light and also to justify changing the firms pension contribution structure to be less generous, he made the decision to present these issues as a zero sum game in which the beneficiaries of medical insurance - something which is part of employee compensation to begin with - were presented as the cause of a reduction in the pension compensation of everyone else.

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

#177

Post by gwern »

sgk284 wrote: post #133
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…

If the child lives to 80, she only needs to contribute an additional $12,500 worth of value to civilization per year for this to make economic sense. Another way to look at this: the government has various estimates for the value of a human life. It averages about $7MM. The "extraordinary" expense of this child actually only requires a 14% increase in value over the average citizen to make sense. Most importantly tho…

> If the child lives to 80, she only needs to contribute $12,500 worth of value to civilization per year for this to make economic sense.

No, that's not correct. You're not thinking at the margin.

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

#179

Post by late2part »

late2part wrote: post #171
yummyfajitas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

I don't understand. What does Obamacare/ACA have to do with this issue?

Oh, I think I know. You are saying that ACA increased their costs, so they had to cut benefits to their employees because the federal government demanded that the company pay more money to the insurance companies so that the insurance companies could subsidize healthcare for unemployed and underemployed people? And Armstrong said he was cutting 401k benefits because of these cost increases?

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

#180

Post by ars »

MattBearman wrote: post #7
scarmig wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Armstrong blaming Obamacare (its mandate for medical coverage for situations like this) for the benefit cuts also has an interesting implication: If not for Obamacare, AOL would have provided a insurance plan that wouldn't have covered this child, and instead left her to die and her family in a permanent state of medical bankruptcy. ETA: For the record, I think most insurance policies have covered this for awhile…

left her to die and her family in a permanent state of medical bankruptcy. I can't get my head round this, as someone born and raised in the UK, America's health care system (or lack there of) is the single thing that will stop me ever wanting to live in the US.

The reason you can't wrap your head around it is that it's not actually true.

People love saying that about America, but it's not true and never has been.

For cases like that there is government insurance. It's called Medicaid, or Chip, or a bunch of other names, and it's available everywhere.

(And it doesn't help that the person you replied to is doubly confused and combined two unrelated things to confuse him even more. The CEO was saying that Obamacare was an added expense - it had nothing to do with the babies.)

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