141–150 of 314 posts
Feels like the headline should include "In America". This certainly doesn't happen in the rest of the civilized world.
The title should definitely include that, such a shame that US is so behind with human rights :-(
I recently watched a family member go through this. A few things that were sobering to see: - Three weeks in she was buried in paperwork. One chemo treatment would turn into 4-5 invoices from different subcontractors at a single hospital, some covered by her insurance, others not covered. Her insurer denied claims arbitrarily and made her go through a bunch of invasive and unnecessary procedures to prove her illness.…
I recently watched a family member go through this. A few things that were sobering to see: - Three weeks in she was buried in paperwork. One chemo treatment would turn into 4-5 invoices from different subcontractors at a single hospital, some covered by her insurance, others not covered. Her insurer denied claims arbitrarily and made her go through a bunch of invasive and unnecessary procedures to prove her illness.…
Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. Recently my mother had a flare-up up radiation-induced pneumonitis and the PPO insurance she pays $14,000 annually wouldn’t approve a single unit of Advair. It took a week of talking to doctors and insurance drones to figure out that they were pushing her to an alternative that cost them $100 less. If I woke up tomorrow and people were burni…
The political class just divides us and keeps us fighting over non-issues.
We're like crabs in a bucket, fighting with each other on the way to the pot of boiling water.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And before people get too comfortable -- Every single "Obamacare replacement" plan does away with the ban on lifetime caps either directly or indirectly. These are enormously beneficial to insurance companies (they essentially have unlimited liability without them) and there is a ton of money to have the caps reinstated.
> These are enormously beneficial to insurance companies (they essentially have unlimited liability without them) and there is a ton of money to have the caps reinstated. I don't understand why you'd phrase it this way. Under the ACA, 80% of premiums have to go to medical care. A dollar saved providing care disproportionately benefits the premium payers, not the company. People act like all this money comes out of in…
The purpose of insurance is to provide me a way to pay for disasters that I otherwise could not afford. To that end I make payments that, on average, leave me poorer. But since I can afford the payments and can't afford the disaster, it leaves my expected quality of life better off by reducing the variance in my expected outcomes.
When I am paying a premium to pay for normal things that I can actually afford, that is not serving as insurance. It is now just a bad deal for me, pay extra for a middleman that I have no reason to want.
I may not want that middleman, but health care insurance companies want to be one. They therefore want me to pay a premium to them for things that I could have afforded, and not cover things that I couldn't afford. To that end they work to construct deals with employers+government so that employees don't have a viable alternative to entering this deal no matter what my opinion is.
This would give them a large amount of business with a guaranteed profit margin. And leaves me uninsured exactly when I would have wanted to be insured. I understand exactly why they want to be in that line of business. But none of the rest of us should support that.
Incidentally, while we are at it, the ACA has a really bad perverse incentive. As you say, 80% of premiums have to go to medical care. Which means that if health care providers charge more, then "insurance" companies are allowed to profit more.
Now look at this from the point of the insurance company's CEOs. As long as they can predict the growth in medical expenses, growing medical expenses are good for their bottom line. Where then the incentive for cost savings?
Better yet, if they know that some of those medical expenses are fraudulent and can readily expose it, they can always keep their predictions of expenses in line with the reality by exposing just enough fraud to make their predictions accurate. This is an incentive to turn a temporary blind eye to fraud.
And so the ongoing explosion of medical expenses is good for insurance companies.
Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. Recently my mother had a flare-up up radiation-induced pneumonitis and the PPO insurance she pays $14,000 annually wouldn’t approve a single unit of Advair. It took a week of talking to doctors and insurance drones to figure out that they were pushing her to an alternative that cost them $100 less. If I woke up tomorrow and people were burni…
In the US, it would have been sufficient to vote for a different party. Enjoy the government, the majority of you people voted for.
Except in the lower house of the national legislature (where the dominant party is still significantly overrepresented compared to the popular vote for that body), the dominant party in the political branches of the US government was not supported by a majority of voters in election to each body, even if you only consider major party votes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really true. A few cancers can be put into permanent remission (eg Hodgkins'), but most cancers kill you regardless of what you do.
You should do more research. Most skin cancers are trivial to treat. Testicular cancer, one of the most common cancers in boys and young men is, for the most part, extremely treatable as long as it's caught relatively early.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average basically is the median - IQ is pretty well normally distributed.
Just to continue the aside, it actually is perfectly normally distributed, since it is a purely statistical measure. http://michna.com/iq.htm
Case 1: IQ tests are of the form:
100 + 20 x F_N^-1( F_R(R) )
Case 2: IQ tests are of the form
c1 + c2 x R
If what is actually done is case 1, then what you say is correct, and saying "IQ is normally distributed" has no empirical content.
If what is actually done is case 2, then saying "IQ is normally distributed" translates to "R is normally distributed" and has some empirical content. In particular, R (thus IQ) might not be normally distributed.
(The article seems to argue, but doesn't make the case that case 1 is the case.)
EDIT to add: dunno what the Variance is actually, might be 15^2 rather than 20^2.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the study appears to be looking at 2000–2012. The lifetime limit ban started on March 23rd 2010, according to this Vox article: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/15/14563182/o... Thanks Obama.
Every European health care system, I believe, has some way of limiting the amount of care provided to people. It is just not so out in the open as a dollar cap on what people can get in a lifetime. Not every possible, super-expensive procedure is approved to be available to people through the public healthcare system. (Would love to hear of a country that has "universal health care" that does not limit what procedure…
We have very good evidence that these new, expensive, treatments do not extend life and that they make quality of life worse.
England set up something called the Cancer Drugs Fund. This provided access to new medication that hadn't yet been assessed for value; that were in the process of being assessed; or that had been assessed and were found to be too expensive for no benefit over existing treatment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Drugs_Fund
Most drugs paid for by £1.27bn Cancer Drugs Fund had no “meaningful benefit” https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2097
The Cancer Drugs Fund was popular with the UK press who pushed for it to be expanded without bothering to see if it was extending life or improving quality of life. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/014107681879680...
> Health care already is 17% of the US GDP and the US government spends more % of GDP on healthcare in America than almost all European countries.
And yet it has worse outcomes across a range of measures, including "life expectancy".
Meanwhile, in Turkey... https://www.dailysabah.com/turkey/2018/07/06/cancer-treatmen...