Republicans Say the Darndest Things!

https://twitter.com/acyn/status/1578910976740536320?s=46&t=Ts3LlB6rVLJhi6KhDSxoqA

It’s so-so for most insurance products, and horrendously bad for health insurance. Because there exist people like “person x”. So underwriting health insurance basically means no one can be meaningfully insured against the risk of developing an expensive condition.

This is why we should have universal health insurance. Like every other country that can afford it, and several that can’t.

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Had to google “person X”. It’s a 17 year old with hemophilia that somehow costs a $million / month. Which is a lot, even for a hemophiliac.

If you want to complain a solution not able to handle that boy, try to ask yourself if what alternative is actually better, and whether that alternative is politically feasible.

I barely worked in health, really only in stop loss, but hemophilia was one of those conditioned that was just insanely expensive, always lasered (which for those who aren’t familiar, a laser puts a higher spec deductible on that person because their claims are known to be high. This sounds cruel, but has no impact on the participant, only their employer - although I’ve often wondered if this has resulted in any employees being fired for the cost).

Universal healthcare isn’t perfect but the current situation is an unsustainable mess. Unlike other types of insurance, everyone utilizes healthcare and society isn’t willing to completely turn their back on those who can’t afford medical care, including those who choose not to insure themselves even if they can afford it. We’re collectively on the hook anyway. Universal healthcare is a way to streamline that.

I have a PPO and still ended up with a $3k bill after insurance for an ER visit this summer. I could afford it but there’s a significant amount of our country’s population that couldn’t, so they go into debt, declare bankruptcy, or the hospital writes off charity care. There are insured people who don’t seek or proceed with recommended treatment because there’s still a huge price tag. I even paused seeking treatment but decided avoiding the small but real risk of death was worth it.

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Catastrophic reinsurance that is spread beyond just the members of the particular state and group/individual market.

Obviously that wouldn’t be legal but the employer would have a motivation to seek out a legal reason.

This is the first I’ve heard the term “lasered”. Does the employer know which employee is lasered? Can you explain more about how that process works?

I’ve only worked on it from a reserving standpoint, not a pricing or MGU standpoint, so I really don’t know how much the employer knows.

A laser can be applied to covered lives with very high costs - cancer treatments, chronic conditions, etc. I believe the stop loss provider has a limited number of lasers they can apply, and my understanding is that the aggregate deductible does not get increased by the amounts of the lasers (but hitting the agg deductible is not as common as hitting the spec deductibles).

And some contracts can be negotiated with no lasers - but those will incur higher premiums, naturally.

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I mean, given HIPAA, I can assume the employers cannot be told who has high costs, but I don’t know if they get told “a covered life has had a laser applied” or not. Many of these employers are large enough to self-insure but not large enough to absorb the entire risk, so if they know they have a covered life with a laser, I don’t know how difficult it would be to piece it together, especially if that person was taking medical leave or something. I know I share some health info with my employer, voluntarily. I probably shouldn’t.

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when a member of a plan is lasered, the buyer (the HR team, possibly the risk management/treasury/finance team) is told there is a laser and may get the name of the member. someone at the company 100% knows “joe smith” is lasered and to what amount.

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Another day another Trump Karen being ridiculously uncivil. Watch the video, it shows what we’re up against.

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From Ex-Prosecutor: Trump's Claims About Bush Make Him Look Guilty, Scared

Whoa, whoe waoah, guys, You’re looking for the “Republicans say the darndest things!” thread.
It’s been 500 posts since this was that.

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Good Lord. I guess deflection is a strategy that has worked for him so far.

Even if GHWB actually did break the law, that doesn’t make it less illegal for Trump to do so. Plus I’m assuming he’s just completely making up s*** about GHWB anyway.

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We are aware that there is a giant tangent in this thread on healthcare. No need to keep flagging posts as off topic. It’s a bit of a project to drag them all to a new thread. Maybe I’ll do it later tonight or tomorrow.

Here is the background, which I just learned. It appears this is how it’s done by NARA, they rent (presumably inexpensive) space that gets used to sift through documents. I don’t know if they would normally cull out Top Secret or SCI type documents before sending it to such a location.

Surprising, but my impression is that the archives chose the space and certainly the archivists were going through it.

I think quite a few posts in that tangent fit the theme of the thread.

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Very meta.

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