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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

#231

Post by shiven »

mindcrime wrote: post #150
ceph_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man who makes 12 million a year decries outlandish million dollar spending to save child's life. The guy is absolute scum.

decries outlandish million dollar spending to save child's life. Where exactly did he do that?

He is quoted saying that right on the linked page. But here is the exact quote, in case you haven't perused the original submission:

"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, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan."

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

#232

Post by bigchewy »

a3n wrote: post #85
lutusp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 insuran…

Insurance companies re-insure. Can't a self-insured company do the same? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance

yes. every self insured company I've known re-insures. When you get to the size of Wal-Mart, perhaps you don't bother. For smaller employers, reinsurance (also called stop loss) is a major cost

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

#233

Post by woodchuck64 »

woodchuck64 wrote: post #27

Curious that AOL had to pay millions of dollars for insurance claims. Isn't that the insurance company's responsibility?

AOL decides to take on the responsibilities and risks of an insurance company and then blames the employees and Obamacare when it doesn't work out? Wow. Armstrong is quite a piece of work.

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

#234

Post by therobot24 »

a3n wrote: post #222
therobot24 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so i lack empathy because i think an article that primarily uses empathy can be manipulative? classy...

therobot, I can't reply to your reply. (Except now I can, so I moved it. /HN) No, I don't think you lack empathy, although I can see how my comment could be taken that way. Apologies.

No hard feelings. The article is important - especially being from one of the mothers affected by the statement, her words carry more weight than others for sure.

However, i do also think her bias in the matter let the article drift from the costs of cost-cutting in health care (losing faith in a business), and slide into fearmongering. A harsh word, yes, but she has a platform, she has our attention, and she has experience where it counts, but instead of showing what we can learn from it, she decided to pull our heart strings at every turn.

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

#235

Post by gojomo »

yscale wrote: post #195
luckydude wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once a childless single white male programmer. Oh, and an asshole. Didn't realize it at the time but I wised up. Give him time and cut him a little slack, he's entitled to his opinion.

He's entitled to his (ignorant) opinions, but he's not entitled to be so pointlessly rude and cruel with his method of expressing it. If this was a dinner party, I'd quietly ask him to excuse himself, and he'd never be invited again. His choice of language was pointlessly cruel and outrageous.

If all conversations were limited to dinner-party politeness, we'd remain trapped in a state of childlike obliviousness about the real disagreements and difficulties of the world.

(My dinner party would welcome both paul and thaumasiotes, as people able to speak about a difficult topic calmly, with strong and contrasting perspectives based on real experience. In contrast, yscale would be asked to apologize or leave for content-free name-calling.)

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

#236

Post by EdwardDiego »

shasta wrote: post #217
DanBC wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you'd be annoyed if you had a hand or foot amputated? And they're just lumps of cells that have never had a coherent thought.

Did you really think my argument was that anything that is a lump of cells that has never had a coherent thought has no value? I can understand a sense of loss in losing an infant at birth. You make plans for the child and are excited to meet the person they will become. It's a miscarriage. A similar loss is learning that your spouse can't get pregnant in the first place. It's not the same as losing a child of 3, 6,…

> You make plans for the child and are excited to meet the person they will become. It's a miscarriage.

You often interact with children in utero before they are born. Also, at about 4 - 5 months (it'll vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) a miscarriage becomes a stillbirth and requires a birth and death certificate.

And while I have not lost a child at 3/6/12/24, I have lost a child at 6 months into a pregnancy, and it was quite probably the worst experience of my life - worse than my experiences during this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake - and I was trying to dig crushed people out from underneath rubble.

Births are (these days anyway), normally a joyous event wherein a new life comes into the world. A stillbirth is the polar opposite - especially if the baby died sometime before the birth was induced.

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

#237

Post by gojomo »

We need new words to describe new patterns of social news and commentary. For aspects of this situation, I first propose 'paraphrage':

paraphrage (v): to paraphrase in a way to maximize outrage

Tim Armstrong has been widely paraphraged as saying, "we're cutting your 401(k)s because two AOLers had distressed babies last year".

Paraphraging not only brings many profitable clicks, but it removes complicating details that interfere with an audience's offensertainment.

offensertainment (n): amusement or enjoyment felt by taking offense, and expressing moral indignation, usually in solidarity with some larger group

The isolation and individual disempowerment of modern online life has driven many people to seek a compensating sense of joy, purpose, and belonging through offensertainment. Leading offensertainment providers include Gawker, the Huffington Post, and Slate, but the full participatory experience also requires forwarding, commentary, and button-pushing through services like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter – and HN.

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

#238

Post by dlokshin »

balloot wrote: post #166
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…

Even your own data completely undermines your point. All those other countries have very comparable preterm infant mortality rates when measured against the US. You say the girl "likely" would have died in France, but in Norway and Sweden (two of the most socialist countries in the world) the girl would have had a better chance of surviving at 25 weeks. By your own data that is supposedly proving the ineffectiveness…

Except for the part where this is 37 weeks and not 25 weeks which is 30% of the entire duration of pregnancy. The story is from AOL is at the 5 month mark which means it could be even earlier than that.

Can't go back to watching Fox News because I don't have a TV. Nice, red herring, though.

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

#239

Post by shiven »

clavalle wrote: post #201
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…

My father in law is a neonatologist and was given an ownership stake of the NICU he started in a midwestern hospital. He makes around $4 mil/year. Granted, he does sometimes stay at the hospital for two weeks at a time with only very brief visits home but at this point he also owns apartment complexes, office buildings, a gentleman's ranch with a few dozen horses and staff and on and on. I think it is shameful, perso…

I think it is shameful, personally, that he profits so much.

Profits from saving human lives. Can a price be really put on a human life? Sure you can cite economics and a number like $7MM or whatever, but would you, personally, decide against paying that amount (assuming you had the money) to save your or your loved one's life, push come to shove?

And of course, it is always about resource availability, in this case the resource being money.

He works hard and he saves lives, it's true, but how much is enough?

Demand and supply. He works at a level of specialization that is a cluster of "black swan" events. Hence also, his crazy hours and most importantly, responsibilities. Do you have experience working at a position that is a nexus of similar conditions? Have you ever felt responsible for the life of not one but multiple human beings? And have that responsibility extend over your entire career, each day, every day? Now tell me, how much money would be enough to do work like that and keep doing it well?

Note: I am specifically focusing on money, because that is the question that was raised. Let's not divert the conversation into job satisfaction or humanity and all that, in this particular discussion.

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

#240

Post by Crake »

yscale wrote: post #135
thaumasiotes wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your reference: I don't have children of my own. When I was 16, my mother gave birth to twins, so I have more parenting experience than the typical childless American, including that of holding closely-related infants. > It's easier to make the calls before you have a kid, they are calls in theory. After you have a kid you are changed Very true, but I don't see myself reversing on this.

You are an ignorant, arrogant idiot, and a callous asshole. BTW, we already knew you didn't have kids. We knew that both from your beliefs, and moreso from the the hurtful language you chose to use. We all already knew you were childless. And single. And white. And male. And a programmer. And an asshole. Now do the world a favor, and shut up. Forever.

> And single. And white. And male. And a programmer.

Ok, asshole childless person is at least mildly related to the topic at hand, but the rest of these just seem like irrelevant ad hominems.

>Now do the world a favor, and shut up. Forever.

Why do I get the feeling your tumblr is full of equally venomous "go kill yourself"s?

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