There was a natural gas leak up the street that caused the city to decide to evacuate a six block area. When we got home from work we found two messages on the answering machine. The first message was the fire department telling us we needed to evacuate. The second was also the fire department -- telling us we could come home again.
Query: Why would you call the home you ordered evacuated to tell them they could come home?
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Allstate
You may recall my previous post on Geico's stupid commercial. Well, apparently stupid advertising is not limited to Geico, because Allstate does it too. More to the point, Allstate assumes you are stupid.
A recent ad showing a lot on TV has their spokesman saying you'll be surprised by how much people save by switching to Allstate; or at least that's what they want you to come away with. But what they really say (with a slightly different emphasis) is "People who*switched* from Geico to Allstate saved" some amount of money. Query: If I wasn't going to save, why would I switch? In fact, if only 1 person in the whole world saved by using Allstate over Geico and that person switched and saved $700, the they could say that people who switched to Allstate from Geico saved an average of $700. Even if everyone else saved $1000 switching from Allstate to Geico.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who saw this too. So, hey Allstate, how about telling us what the average person pays on the same average policy between you and Geico? Or would that statistic be too useful to consumers?
Disclaimer: Author insures with Erie Ins. Co.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Being number two
On NPR today, they were interviewing Gale someone who seems to have written a book. I would assume that she is a feminist based on the topic and the questions. The host asked her if now that since in almost every college the number of women outnumber the number of men and women are 50% of the work force was feminism done?
She responded by saying it had changed and then launched out with this little gem: She observed that when there are two sexes, one will always be ahead in something and one behind. When the host asked, she concluded that it was okay to be in the top two.
Now, I understand that there is a difference in just being second and having everyone assume you are not as good and therefore second. However, saying basically that it is okay to be number two because someone has to do it, sounds distinctly contrary to the position espoused by most feminists for the last 90 years and especially the last 40 years. How would they have reacted if some male pundit on some radio show when asked why there were more men in the workplace, college, politics, etc. replied, "Someone has to be number two."
She responded by saying it had changed and then launched out with this little gem: She observed that when there are two sexes, one will always be ahead in something and one behind. When the host asked, she concluded that it was okay to be in the top two.
Now, I understand that there is a difference in just being second and having everyone assume you are not as good and therefore second. However, saying basically that it is okay to be number two because someone has to do it, sounds distinctly contrary to the position espoused by most feminists for the last 90 years and especially the last 40 years. How would they have reacted if some male pundit on some radio show when asked why there were more men in the workplace, college, politics, etc. replied, "Someone has to be number two."
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
CURRENT thoughts on the Healthcare Debate
The “Healthcare Debate” has been raging for several months now and appears to have no end in sight. Like many people, I’ve been mulling it over and I have some thoughts, and not the ones I expected to have.
First, let’s remind everyone that money is a zero sum game. Assume insurance is voluntary and assume you have two people in an insurance pool where assume everyone paid $500 a month in health insurance. For the purposes of this example, assume they are the only two people in the world. If Person One needs on average $700 of healthcare in a month, then Person One considers the insurance to be “worth it” But assume Person Two only needs $300 a month in healthcare. Thus for Person Two the insurance is not worth it. Ignoring for a minute any need to make a profit, the insurance company is breaking even. However, Person Two will likely opt not to be insured in this system because that is the logical choice for Two. Suddenly the insurance company is looking at a $200 per month loss. It raises the cost of insurance to $700 per month which means that One is paying what he spends. If you assume that the insurance company wanted to make any profit at all, One is better off not having insurance. If instead of just two people, there were five people, with gradated amounts of need, you still have a good chance of getting back to just One as each drops off in turn when the insurance becomes “not worth it.” If you force the insurance company to carry a loss, eventually you have no insurance company. If you force people to pay for insurance that “isn’t worth it,” they get angry.
The above is grossly over simplified but illustrates the market forces at work and also shows that where someone benefits from such a system there must be corresponding losses. Consider that most people, when young, are usually fairly healthy and have low healthcare costs. The few exceptions who need a great deal of expensive healthcare at a young age only serve to reinforce the problem above. As they age, people’s generally healthcare costs rise. Yet if we insured only the elderly and the sick, you would see astronomical premiums, and that assumes that the insurance companies would to insure at all. But if you FORCE the healthy to pay for the insurance, almost always at a higher rate then they will incur in costs, they will get angry.
I know at this point, if not sooner, someone will point out that you take out insurance to cover the unexpected large cost. No one takes out fire insurance because they hope to need it and make money on it. To some extent this is true and I will point out that I did say my example was over-simplified. However, consider that with fire insurance, the insurance company can choose not to insure a bad risk. That is often not the case with health insurance because often employer insurance ignores pre-existing conditions (the health insurance word for bad risk). And some of the new healthcare plans are talking about forcing insurance companies to insure even people with pre-existing conditions. “Gonna need $11M in treatments that might not even work, sure join the party; we’ll be happy to pay (to doctors!) for you to experiment.” The flip-side problem is of course, if these people are the ones who really need “insurance” and if they don’t have to, no insurance company in the world will take them.
At this point, I come to two conclusions. First, in a purely open system, if you let people choose to have healthcare or not depending on their own self-interest, which in humans is invariably short-sighted, they will only choose to do so once they cross the threshold of “needing it” by which I mean they get free money because their expenses exceed the cost of insurance. Second, I conclude that we aren’t in most cases, talking about insurance at all, for all we continue to use that term. Insurance is something you buy for that one-time, catastrophic, unexpected event that costs you a lot of money. If your house burns down or you total your car, these are such catastrophic events, and insurance against them works because lots of people pool money over time so that if such an emergency occurs, the party facing the hardship finds most of the expense paid by his or her “neighbors.” To some extent, “health insurance”, works like real insurance. If you need to fix a broken arm or have your tonsils out, it covers that. However, most of health insurance (and more and more this seems to be what people are talking about when they mention the concept) is not insurance at all; it’s a payment plan.
People want health “insurance” to cover routine doctor visits and long term illnesses or life-long conditions. They want to pay in so much and have these expenses covered, many of which are later in life. Further, everyone will die and usually with some healthcare complication. Everyone should go to the doctor periodically. With these things, what people mean when they say “health insurance” is some way to spread out paying for them over a longer period (often a life time) or, better yet, have someone else pay some of the costs when everything is totaled. (And we discussed at the beginning of this entry why the latter can’t work for everyone.) I think it would help the debate a lot if we admitted we are talking about a national healthcare payment plan because that shifts the paradigm of thinking.
Now there is an option for a payment plan coupled with insurance and that is the Healthcare Savings Account, but it only works if you start young and don’t get sick until you are older. The HSA has two parts. First, it has “catastrophic” coverage for any super major expenses. This had a very high deductible however. Then you have the HSA account which is similar to an IRA (meaning you can deduct what you invest in it from your pre-tax income up to a certain amount per year). The account can then be used to pay for healthcare expenses without being taxed. Generally, if you start young and invest regularly, you will accumulate money in the beginning meaning you have a dedicated reserve to pay for later costs (making it a payment plan – pay early when you don’t need to so you have the money later). The hazard is also one of the benefits of the account; it can be invested like an IRA. That means if you choose to invest with some risk, you can end up losing money. Finally, once you are 65, you can withdraw from it like it was an IRA and pay taxes then. For some reason I can’t fathom, Democrats don’t like the HSAs and keep making them more difficult. However, they are the only thing I can think of that comes close to being insurance with a payment plan.
So, now we have established that we are, to a large degree, talking about a healthcare payment plan. We also know that if left unregulated in the hands of insurance companies, only the “good risks” will be insured (which is fine if you are one of the good risks). Since age makes people a bad risk, this has obvious consequences. However, we also know we cannot have a functioning system if John (or Jane) Q Public can choose to only participate in the payment plan once s/he needs it. We also must not lose sight of two other factors: 1) It is the damn DOCTORS who make a shitload of money off healthcare. They may wear white coats, and many of them are good people, but a large percentage are greedy bastard who think their white coat gives them an entitlement. If you don’t believe me, read some NON-MALPRACTICE cases where doctors (or better yet groups of doctors who get together for investment purposes) get sued. 2) It is our CULTURE OF HEALTHCARE as a populace which is driving this mess. There is a tendency in our society to say: a) Oh no, Aunt Sally is dying; and b) Death is the absolute worst evil and must be opposed at any and all costs and extremes; which means c) good and loving children/spouses/people/doctors will try everything possible, regardless of probability of success or cost if Aunt Sally might benefit; because d) if we don’t we aren’t good loving family to her; and besides e) we don’t have to pay for it. I’m not saying as soon as Aunt Sally sneezes, she should be placed in hospice nor am I saying that everyone thinks in the above manner. However, a significant number of Americans seem to and when you are spending thousands of dollars of other people’s money on an experimental treatments with a .003 chance of success, it’s a problem. Worse, it’s a damn hard problem to criticize without looking like an insensitive number-crunching bastard. After all, how can you put a price on life (especially if the number-crunching bastard in question never knew Aunt Sally and what a wonderful person she was). Of course, those emotionally involved are not good decision makers here either; they may know aunt Sally, but it is rarely their money they spend which makes it very easy to do. The Doctors are also in a position where when they order a test, they don’t have to pay for it and might even get part of the test fee. They face a lot of pressure from families and, not wanting to look like number-crunching bastards, usually order a test, even if it is unnecessary. After all, the one big incentive they have is to not get sued by distraught family members who think the Doctor could have/should have done more. Doctors rarely get sued for running too many tests. The “Do everything possible, Doctor” method of operation is one of the major things pushing up the cost of Healthcare.
So where am I on this debate, not being a fan of doctors, insurance companies, or the wisdom of the masses? It is undeniable that healthcare has costs for our society. Even were we to insure no one and provide no medi-whatever benefits, we would have a cost. If you presume (and I say presume because I don’t want to get into another long argument about the presumption) that society benefits from having more healthy, longer-lived people in it, then you can conclude that the People, and vicariously the government of the People, has a vested interest in making it so. The analogy I draw is actually to education.
Education is something else for which we presume the polis benefits by having more and better educated citizens. It is not, strictly speaking, a fundamental human right nor is it particularly guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Education is an investment the people make in themselves, and it is an expensive one. However, having deemed education to be beneficial and worth while, the government provides every person in the country with a certain minimum education, even the abnormally expensive students. No one, to my knowledge, leads a serious attack on the concept of public education as being socialist or argues that the government should not pay (and tax) to provide it. Sure, we have arguments about how much to tax for it or whether those who opt out and go private should receive credit for the tax, but that is not the same thing.
Which brings me to: If having a healthy population is beneficial to the polis and therefore desired by the People, it should be treated exactly like public education. That probably means that I believe it should be funded by a tax, probably created by Healthcare Boards elected just like School Boards, and administered, TO A MINIMUM LEVEL, by the government though those self same Healthcare Boards. This means I probably support the government option and believe that any program without it is wasting time. Everyone should be taxed to provide these minimum services and the services should probably come through a government facility and government doctors. Likewise, just as people can opt to send their children to private schools, people should be able to opt to for care at a non-government facility for healthcare if they want to AND IF THEY CAN AFFORD TO DO SO FROM THEIR OWN POCKET. They would still be paying the Healthcare tax just as people who opt for private school still pay school tax. This covers the payment plan aspect of the debate with one small notation. The healthcare thus provided will not be an “all-possible-measures” type of care. It will provide reasonable care that reasonably has a chance to do something and always provide hospice care. If the patient wants to opt for additional care or radical treatments, they can do so at their own cost (or for free if someone’s research budget will cover them).
With the government providing certain minimum levels of healthcare (including office visits and long-term illness treating), health INSURANCE now becomes true Insurance just like fire insurance. You can opt to take it so that if you want to “go private” you can. You can also opt not to without compromising your basic care. Employers would not have to provide it (but would be paying taxes towards the government facilities in return). Even HSA’s would continue to have a place. Perhaps, insurance would cover catastrophic injury beyond basic care, perhaps it would only be in case you wanted to try a treatment not provided by the government facilities. This gets vague until you know exactly what the government clinics will provide. The best example may be Britain’s system. This is, however, all detail work and this post is concerned with broad concepts and philosophy.
I don’t LIKE my answer above, but the more I looked at it, the more I concluded that we cannot go on the way we have. Like education, basic, life-long healthcare seems to be something the government can and should provide, knowing that it will get expensive at the end for most people. Having reached that conclusion, the obvious answer seemed to be not only a public “option” but a tax-supported one that can be opted out of by those with the means and desire to do so. I can find arguments why I’m wrong – plenty of them, but they all fail on the question, “What do you have that is better?” Public education in America is far from ideal, however it is better than any other option I can see. I’m afraid I’ve come to the same view on Healthcare in spite of my loathing for Big Government. (And I’ll note that my solution would use local government like school boards as much as possible instead of national government.)
First, let’s remind everyone that money is a zero sum game. Assume insurance is voluntary and assume you have two people in an insurance pool where assume everyone paid $500 a month in health insurance. For the purposes of this example, assume they are the only two people in the world. If Person One needs on average $700 of healthcare in a month, then Person One considers the insurance to be “worth it” But assume Person Two only needs $300 a month in healthcare. Thus for Person Two the insurance is not worth it. Ignoring for a minute any need to make a profit, the insurance company is breaking even. However, Person Two will likely opt not to be insured in this system because that is the logical choice for Two. Suddenly the insurance company is looking at a $200 per month loss. It raises the cost of insurance to $700 per month which means that One is paying what he spends. If you assume that the insurance company wanted to make any profit at all, One is better off not having insurance. If instead of just two people, there were five people, with gradated amounts of need, you still have a good chance of getting back to just One as each drops off in turn when the insurance becomes “not worth it.” If you force the insurance company to carry a loss, eventually you have no insurance company. If you force people to pay for insurance that “isn’t worth it,” they get angry.
The above is grossly over simplified but illustrates the market forces at work and also shows that where someone benefits from such a system there must be corresponding losses. Consider that most people, when young, are usually fairly healthy and have low healthcare costs. The few exceptions who need a great deal of expensive healthcare at a young age only serve to reinforce the problem above. As they age, people’s generally healthcare costs rise. Yet if we insured only the elderly and the sick, you would see astronomical premiums, and that assumes that the insurance companies would to insure at all. But if you FORCE the healthy to pay for the insurance, almost always at a higher rate then they will incur in costs, they will get angry.
I know at this point, if not sooner, someone will point out that you take out insurance to cover the unexpected large cost. No one takes out fire insurance because they hope to need it and make money on it. To some extent this is true and I will point out that I did say my example was over-simplified. However, consider that with fire insurance, the insurance company can choose not to insure a bad risk. That is often not the case with health insurance because often employer insurance ignores pre-existing conditions (the health insurance word for bad risk). And some of the new healthcare plans are talking about forcing insurance companies to insure even people with pre-existing conditions. “Gonna need $11M in treatments that might not even work, sure join the party; we’ll be happy to pay (to doctors!) for you to experiment.” The flip-side problem is of course, if these people are the ones who really need “insurance” and if they don’t have to, no insurance company in the world will take them.
At this point, I come to two conclusions. First, in a purely open system, if you let people choose to have healthcare or not depending on their own self-interest, which in humans is invariably short-sighted, they will only choose to do so once they cross the threshold of “needing it” by which I mean they get free money because their expenses exceed the cost of insurance. Second, I conclude that we aren’t in most cases, talking about insurance at all, for all we continue to use that term. Insurance is something you buy for that one-time, catastrophic, unexpected event that costs you a lot of money. If your house burns down or you total your car, these are such catastrophic events, and insurance against them works because lots of people pool money over time so that if such an emergency occurs, the party facing the hardship finds most of the expense paid by his or her “neighbors.” To some extent, “health insurance”, works like real insurance. If you need to fix a broken arm or have your tonsils out, it covers that. However, most of health insurance (and more and more this seems to be what people are talking about when they mention the concept) is not insurance at all; it’s a payment plan.
People want health “insurance” to cover routine doctor visits and long term illnesses or life-long conditions. They want to pay in so much and have these expenses covered, many of which are later in life. Further, everyone will die and usually with some healthcare complication. Everyone should go to the doctor periodically. With these things, what people mean when they say “health insurance” is some way to spread out paying for them over a longer period (often a life time) or, better yet, have someone else pay some of the costs when everything is totaled. (And we discussed at the beginning of this entry why the latter can’t work for everyone.) I think it would help the debate a lot if we admitted we are talking about a national healthcare payment plan because that shifts the paradigm of thinking.
Now there is an option for a payment plan coupled with insurance and that is the Healthcare Savings Account, but it only works if you start young and don’t get sick until you are older. The HSA has two parts. First, it has “catastrophic” coverage for any super major expenses. This had a very high deductible however. Then you have the HSA account which is similar to an IRA (meaning you can deduct what you invest in it from your pre-tax income up to a certain amount per year). The account can then be used to pay for healthcare expenses without being taxed. Generally, if you start young and invest regularly, you will accumulate money in the beginning meaning you have a dedicated reserve to pay for later costs (making it a payment plan – pay early when you don’t need to so you have the money later). The hazard is also one of the benefits of the account; it can be invested like an IRA. That means if you choose to invest with some risk, you can end up losing money. Finally, once you are 65, you can withdraw from it like it was an IRA and pay taxes then. For some reason I can’t fathom, Democrats don’t like the HSAs and keep making them more difficult. However, they are the only thing I can think of that comes close to being insurance with a payment plan.
So, now we have established that we are, to a large degree, talking about a healthcare payment plan. We also know that if left unregulated in the hands of insurance companies, only the “good risks” will be insured (which is fine if you are one of the good risks). Since age makes people a bad risk, this has obvious consequences. However, we also know we cannot have a functioning system if John (or Jane) Q Public can choose to only participate in the payment plan once s/he needs it. We also must not lose sight of two other factors: 1) It is the damn DOCTORS who make a shitload of money off healthcare. They may wear white coats, and many of them are good people, but a large percentage are greedy bastard who think their white coat gives them an entitlement. If you don’t believe me, read some NON-MALPRACTICE cases where doctors (or better yet groups of doctors who get together for investment purposes) get sued. 2) It is our CULTURE OF HEALTHCARE as a populace which is driving this mess. There is a tendency in our society to say: a) Oh no, Aunt Sally is dying; and b) Death is the absolute worst evil and must be opposed at any and all costs and extremes; which means c) good and loving children/spouses/people/doctors will try everything possible, regardless of probability of success or cost if Aunt Sally might benefit; because d) if we don’t we aren’t good loving family to her; and besides e) we don’t have to pay for it. I’m not saying as soon as Aunt Sally sneezes, she should be placed in hospice nor am I saying that everyone thinks in the above manner. However, a significant number of Americans seem to and when you are spending thousands of dollars of other people’s money on an experimental treatments with a .003 chance of success, it’s a problem. Worse, it’s a damn hard problem to criticize without looking like an insensitive number-crunching bastard. After all, how can you put a price on life (especially if the number-crunching bastard in question never knew Aunt Sally and what a wonderful person she was). Of course, those emotionally involved are not good decision makers here either; they may know aunt Sally, but it is rarely their money they spend which makes it very easy to do. The Doctors are also in a position where when they order a test, they don’t have to pay for it and might even get part of the test fee. They face a lot of pressure from families and, not wanting to look like number-crunching bastards, usually order a test, even if it is unnecessary. After all, the one big incentive they have is to not get sued by distraught family members who think the Doctor could have/should have done more. Doctors rarely get sued for running too many tests. The “Do everything possible, Doctor” method of operation is one of the major things pushing up the cost of Healthcare.
So where am I on this debate, not being a fan of doctors, insurance companies, or the wisdom of the masses? It is undeniable that healthcare has costs for our society. Even were we to insure no one and provide no medi-whatever benefits, we would have a cost. If you presume (and I say presume because I don’t want to get into another long argument about the presumption) that society benefits from having more healthy, longer-lived people in it, then you can conclude that the People, and vicariously the government of the People, has a vested interest in making it so. The analogy I draw is actually to education.
Education is something else for which we presume the polis benefits by having more and better educated citizens. It is not, strictly speaking, a fundamental human right nor is it particularly guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Education is an investment the people make in themselves, and it is an expensive one. However, having deemed education to be beneficial and worth while, the government provides every person in the country with a certain minimum education, even the abnormally expensive students. No one, to my knowledge, leads a serious attack on the concept of public education as being socialist or argues that the government should not pay (and tax) to provide it. Sure, we have arguments about how much to tax for it or whether those who opt out and go private should receive credit for the tax, but that is not the same thing.
Which brings me to: If having a healthy population is beneficial to the polis and therefore desired by the People, it should be treated exactly like public education. That probably means that I believe it should be funded by a tax, probably created by Healthcare Boards elected just like School Boards, and administered, TO A MINIMUM LEVEL, by the government though those self same Healthcare Boards. This means I probably support the government option and believe that any program without it is wasting time. Everyone should be taxed to provide these minimum services and the services should probably come through a government facility and government doctors. Likewise, just as people can opt to send their children to private schools, people should be able to opt to for care at a non-government facility for healthcare if they want to AND IF THEY CAN AFFORD TO DO SO FROM THEIR OWN POCKET. They would still be paying the Healthcare tax just as people who opt for private school still pay school tax. This covers the payment plan aspect of the debate with one small notation. The healthcare thus provided will not be an “all-possible-measures” type of care. It will provide reasonable care that reasonably has a chance to do something and always provide hospice care. If the patient wants to opt for additional care or radical treatments, they can do so at their own cost (or for free if someone’s research budget will cover them).
With the government providing certain minimum levels of healthcare (including office visits and long-term illness treating), health INSURANCE now becomes true Insurance just like fire insurance. You can opt to take it so that if you want to “go private” you can. You can also opt not to without compromising your basic care. Employers would not have to provide it (but would be paying taxes towards the government facilities in return). Even HSA’s would continue to have a place. Perhaps, insurance would cover catastrophic injury beyond basic care, perhaps it would only be in case you wanted to try a treatment not provided by the government facilities. This gets vague until you know exactly what the government clinics will provide. The best example may be Britain’s system. This is, however, all detail work and this post is concerned with broad concepts and philosophy.
I don’t LIKE my answer above, but the more I looked at it, the more I concluded that we cannot go on the way we have. Like education, basic, life-long healthcare seems to be something the government can and should provide, knowing that it will get expensive at the end for most people. Having reached that conclusion, the obvious answer seemed to be not only a public “option” but a tax-supported one that can be opted out of by those with the means and desire to do so. I can find arguments why I’m wrong – plenty of them, but they all fail on the question, “What do you have that is better?” Public education in America is far from ideal, however it is better than any other option I can see. I’m afraid I’ve come to the same view on Healthcare in spite of my loathing for Big Government. (And I’ll note that my solution would use local government like school boards as much as possible instead of national government.)
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