7 ms·

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. Apparen

by ekidd 13y ago

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 insurance is that a middle-class family can afford to pay $12,000 or $18,000 in premiums per year, but they can't easily afford a $1M black swan medical event. So the insurance company spreads the risk out over a large pool. The system breaks down, of course, if the pool is too small. A company with 10 employees probably can't absorb a $1M expense either. But AOL has 5,600 employees and it had $1.05B in net income in 2012. They can afford it to cover expenses, even if they decide to self-insure. Of course, another solution is to make the risk pool as big as humanly possible and to get employers out of the insurance business completely, so that no startup needs to worry about medical expenses. The AMA is a messy political compromise to do exactly that. But Tim Armstrong is also upset about the AMA. So I'm not quite sure what his ideal outcome is here.

dlokshin 13y ago
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 than European countries. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm
- goodcanadian 13y ago
  I have a relative who works in a NICU. A 1 in 3 chance of death is actually pretty good odds (relatively speaking) for a premature baby in intensive care, so no, socialized medicine would not have killed this child.
- rwissmann 13y ago
  Where does this myth come from that universal healthcare systems like the European ones deny coverage for black swan events? They don't. What procedures are covered has little to do with whether the system is single payer or not.
- spamizbad 13y ago
  Are you sure about that? France's Infant Mortality Rate is lower than the US. France: 3.34 US: 5.90 (Per 1000 live births) Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
  - dlokshin 13y ago
    The assumption here being that a live birth is as likely in France as it is in the US. What we should be looking for is percentage of survival for infants born sub 25ish weeks or something like that (I don't have that data). UPDATE: And as we see from this paper from the WHO, live birth in the US is not what it means in France, for example. In the US it's any sign of life, in France and Belgium it's living for some period of time: "it has also been common practice in several countries (e.g. Belgium, France, Spain) to register as live births only those infants who survived for a specified period beyond birth" http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/6/07-043471/en/ http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/6/07-043471/en/
  - 300bps 13y ago
    Those statistics aren't exactly Apples to Apples between countries. There are just too many ways countries can cheat. For instance, some countries (like France) ignore births before x weeks whereas most countries (including the U.S.) include all births. Beyond that, the U.S. leads the world in premature birth survival despite also leading the world in assisting people with fertility problems to become pregnant and add to the statistics that on the surface seem problematic for the U.S. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm
- stevoski 13y ago
  Got reliable sources for that claim?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 13y ago
  .. and in the universal-healthcare UK, my brother survived being 12 weeks premature. Do you have a cite for the French system, specifically that withdrawal of care in NICU? English or French will be fine.
  - dlokshin 13y ago
    In the UK they give services, and reasses on an ongoing basis, so different than the French. Added some info for under 37 weeks, where the US comes out on top.
    - balloot 13y ago
      So are you admitting that your original point about single payer healthcare is totally BS? Because the UK has single payer and apparently you think they do a decent job with this situation.
      - dlokshin 13y ago
        My first comment was directly pertinent to the French model, but same for UK--US survival rates are higher for sub 37 week old babies.
- masklinn 13y ago
  > in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes Do you have any source for these claims?
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    It's not super recent, but this paper discusses attitudes in the U.S.: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/120/3/519.full.html http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/120/3/519.full... It sounds like 23 weeks and 500 grams are (were in 2007?) important benchmarks.
- stephenr 13y ago
  If you had government mandated "socialised" health care like the majority of the developed world, the actual cost to provide health care would have been nowhere near as much. I cannot fathom that people accept "12 to 18 $K" as a reasonable amount of money for health care.
- HillRat 13y ago
  The irony is that France didn't even allow most withholding of heroic neonatal care until 2004+ (e.g, la loi Leonetti, etc), whereas the US regularly refused such care until 1984 and then enacted statutory allowances for refusing futile neonatal care in 1986 (Baby Doe revised). Also see the Texas Advance Directives Act of 1999 and withdrawal of futile neonatal care pursuant to it. In fact, France still does not allow withholding of nutrition and fluids from an infant not on a ventilator, a practice that is permissible in the US when care is deemed futile. If you want an example of a state that practices more aggressive withholding of care in the NICU, look at the Netherlands, which has a private insurance model more akin to the US. According to the Nuffield report on neonatal medicine, "In the Netherlands, a consensus had been reached by 2003 that ... Dutch perinatal centers should not normally resuscitate and treat extremely premature babies born before 25 weeks of gestation, because of poor outcomes." According to the report, the difference between the US model and the Netherlands could be seen in that twice as many premature infants born in the US survived to the age of two, but in the US five times as many premature infants had disabling cerebral palsy.
- balloot 13y ago
  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 of single payer healthcare. Go back to Fox News where people don't actually care about facts if you want to make sensational arguments with zero evidence.
  - dlokshin 13y ago
    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.
blahedo 13y ago
You mean ACA (i.e. Obamacare)? The AMA is the American Medical Association (or at least, that's the apparent referent here).
yummyfajitas 13y ago
...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 benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs..." http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-07/aol-ceo-blames-workers-costly-pregnancies-obamacare-for-401-k-cuts http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-07/aol-ceo-blam...
- late2part 13y ago
  I don't understand. What does Obamacare/ACA have to do with this issue?
  - late2part 13y ago
    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?
ryguytilidie 13y ago
The craziest thing to me is what an utterly small drop in the bucket this is and how Tim embarrassed the entire company and their stockholders over an expense that is <1% of AOLs revenue and is less than his yearly salary. He should have been immediately fired for both insensitivity and short-sightedness to the point of incompetence.
- ceph_ 13y ago
  Man who makes 12 million a year decries outlandish million dollar spending to save child's life. The guy is absolute scum.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    decries outlandish million dollar spending to save child's life. Where exactly did he do that?
    - shiven 13y ago
      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."
      - mindcrime 13y ago
        Really? My eyesight must be going bad, because I don't see anywhere in that quote where he calls the spending on these babies "outlandish".
pg 13y ago
"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?
- danielharan 13y ago
  Not said, but isn't that exactly what his cost cutting implies?
  - ericd 13y ago
    No, because he wasn't cutting the medical benefits at all.
    - danielharan 13y ago
      Thanks!
    - mbreese 13y ago
      No, he was cutting benefits in general and used healthcare expenses as a rationale for it. This may be a good thing for the company's bottom line, but the optics are horrible. Even if the policy was sound (and I'm not sure it is), the delivery ruined it. It will be hard to say how he can be an effective leader at this point.
      - ericd 13y ago
        I don't see how you were disagreeing with me? He was making the 401k plan marginally worse, not cutting benefits in general. I wasn't saying anything about his ability to lead going forward, just that if their medical policy is going to continue to be willing to pay for these unusual events in the future that he probably doesn't view them as unacceptable.
        mbreese 13y ago
judk 13y ago
AOL does pay health benefits, what happened was they cut 401k to maintain their comp budget. Rmember : Slate opinion blogs != journalism
- saraid216 13y ago
  Remember: HN comments != Accurate reflection of the OA's claims.
urethra 13y ago
I was LinkedIn stalked by AOL HR two days before this happened. I thought about doing the interview just to get back in the habit but ended up declining the invite and indicating Armstrong's hamfistedness was the reason why.
mindcrime 13y ago
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 man, based on a very limited understanding, and heavily influenced by their own preconceived biases and generic "Robber Barrons, evil, muwahahahaha" stereotypes. I'm not saying that Tim Armstrong is a good person, as I don't know him. But I am very suspicious of this rush to judgment that seems to be going on here.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  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.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    All of that may, or may not, be true. But none of it addresses the issue I was questioning, which is how anybody can claim to understand "Tim Armstrong's attitude towards the lives of his employee's children" based on nothing more than this one news article. I'm saying we shouldn't be rushing to judgment, and creating this caricatured images of Armstrong (or anybody else) and basically screaming "off with his head", without sufficient information. Again, I don't know him... never met the guy in my life. He may be a complete douchebag and a total jackass for all I know. But it would be premature to conclude any of that from this story.
    - robhu 13y ago
      It's not based on 'one news article', it's based on something Armstrong said (and planned to say) which is /reported/ in a news article.
russtrpkovski 13y ago
AOL may be a self insured group where it pays all of the medical costs for its employees. The insurance company merely provides administrative services such processing claims and paying providers.
- tiquorsj 13y ago
  Or, like every other group they get rerated periodically based on claims.
tsotha 13y ago
>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. All he said is they changed the 401k plan because of unexpectedly high medical expenses. He didn't say or imply he wished they didn't save the baby. I can give the kid's mother a pass on two pages of disjointed emoting, but I don't understand why a disinterested observer would write something like you've written.
walshemj 13y ago
What I want to know is what was AOL doing with the money that it was supposedly buying insurance with was it not actually buying insurance but trying to self insure? and using the "insurance monney" to boost its books? The next Question is are the employees 401k's safe and accounted for or is Aol like Maxwell?
Shivetya 13y ago
I figure I am going balls deep into an internet tickle fight, but so be it. Its not AOL's or his responsibility. If anything you can put the cost onto society as a whole. This is the type of insurance the ACA should have been instead of the crap we got. It should have covered catastrophic care, which means million dollar babies provided they can be saved. No company should feel guilty not keeping up benefits because one or two cases blew the bank. They are not there to fix everything. Insurance is a benefit and benefits can be exhausted or become so costly that the cost of doing business means not being in business. So yeah, it sucks. Welcome to the world. The solution is to put catastrophic care into the hands of government and let them decide who gets the care. Let employers and everyday people shop for the best care for non catastrophic care and do it across state lines. Put them all on equal footing. So summary. 1) Government takes care of catastrophic care. They set the limits, the decide who. If you want more you buy it on the secondary market. 2) Individuals and business buy insurance from any/all provides regardless of state. The only rule is, preexisting conditions do not disqualify you. They can however put you into rule #1

by ekidd 13y ago

dlokshin 13y ago

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 than European countries. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm

goodcanadian 13y ago
I have a relative who works in a NICU. A 1 in 3 chance of death is actually pretty good odds (relatively speaking) for a premature baby in intensive care, so no, socialized medicine would not have killed this child.
rwissmann 13y ago
Where does this myth come from that universal healthcare systems like the European ones deny coverage for black swan events? They don't. What procedures are covered has little to do with whether the system is single payer or not.
spamizbad 13y ago
Are you sure about that? France's Infant Mortality Rate is lower than the US. France: 3.34 US: 5.90 (Per 1000 live births) Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
- dlokshin 13y ago
  The assumption here being that a live birth is as likely in France as it is in the US. What we should be looking for is percentage of survival for infants born sub 25ish weeks or something like that (I don't have that data). UPDATE: And as we see from this paper from the WHO, live birth in the US is not what it means in France, for example. In the US it's any sign of life, in France and Belgium it's living for some period of time: "it has also been common practice in several countries (e.g. Belgium, France, Spain) to register as live births only those infants who survived for a specified period beyond birth" http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/6/07-043471/en/ http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/6/07-043471/en/
- 300bps 13y ago
  Those statistics aren't exactly Apples to Apples between countries. There are just too many ways countries can cheat. For instance, some countries (like France) ignore births before x weeks whereas most countries (including the U.S.) include all births. Beyond that, the U.S. leads the world in premature birth survival despite also leading the world in assisting people with fertility problems to become pregnant and add to the statistics that on the surface seem problematic for the U.S. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm
stevoski 13y ago
Got reliable sources for that claim?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 13y ago
.. and in the universal-healthcare UK, my brother survived being 12 weeks premature. Do you have a cite for the French system, specifically that withdrawal of care in NICU? English or French will be fine.
- dlokshin 13y ago
  In the UK they give services, and reasses on an ongoing basis, so different than the French. Added some info for under 37 weeks, where the US comes out on top.
  - balloot 13y ago
    So are you admitting that your original point about single payer healthcare is totally BS? Because the UK has single payer and apparently you think they do a decent job with this situation.
    - dlokshin 13y ago
      My first comment was directly pertinent to the French model, but same for UK--US survival rates are higher for sub 37 week old babies.
masklinn 13y ago
> in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes Do you have any source for these claims?
- maxerickson 13y ago
  It's not super recent, but this paper discusses attitudes in the U.S.: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/120/3/519.full.html http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/120/3/519.full... It sounds like 23 weeks and 500 grams are (were in 2007?) important benchmarks.
stephenr 13y ago
If you had government mandated "socialised" health care like the majority of the developed world, the actual cost to provide health care would have been nowhere near as much. I cannot fathom that people accept "12 to 18 $K" as a reasonable amount of money for health care.
HillRat 13y ago
The irony is that France didn't even allow most withholding of heroic neonatal care until 2004+ (e.g, la loi Leonetti, etc), whereas the US regularly refused such care until 1984 and then enacted statutory allowances for refusing futile neonatal care in 1986 (Baby Doe revised). Also see the Texas Advance Directives Act of 1999 and withdrawal of futile neonatal care pursuant to it. In fact, France still does not allow withholding of nutrition and fluids from an infant not on a ventilator, a practice that is permissible in the US when care is deemed futile. If you want an example of a state that practices more aggressive withholding of care in the NICU, look at the Netherlands, which has a private insurance model more akin to the US. According to the Nuffield report on neonatal medicine, "In the Netherlands, a consensus had been reached by 2003 that ... Dutch perinatal centers should not normally resuscitate and treat extremely premature babies born before 25 weeks of gestation, because of poor outcomes." According to the report, the difference between the US model and the Netherlands could be seen in that twice as many premature infants born in the US survived to the age of two, but in the US five times as many premature infants had disabling cerebral palsy.
balloot 13y ago
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 of single payer healthcare. Go back to Fox News where people don't actually care about facts if you want to make sensational arguments with zero evidence.
- dlokshin 13y ago
  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.

blahedo 13y ago

You mean ACA (i.e. Obamacare)? The AMA is the American Medical Association (or at least, that's the apparent referent here).

yummyfajitas 13y ago

...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 benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs..." http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-07/aol-ceo-blames-workers-costly-pregnancies-obamacare-for-401-k-cuts http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-07/aol-ceo-blam...

late2part 13y ago
I don't understand. What does Obamacare/ACA have to do with this issue?
- late2part 13y ago
  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?

ryguytilidie 13y ago

The craziest thing to me is what an utterly small drop in the bucket this is and how Tim embarrassed the entire company and their stockholders over an expense that is <1% of AOLs revenue and is less than his yearly salary. He should have been immediately fired for both insensitivity and short-sightedness to the point of incompetence.

ceph_ 13y ago
Man who makes 12 million a year decries outlandish million dollar spending to save child's life. The guy is absolute scum.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  decries outlandish million dollar spending to save child's life. Where exactly did he do that?
  - shiven 13y ago
    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."
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      Really? My eyesight must be going bad, because I don't see anywhere in that quote where he calls the spending on these babies "outlandish".

pg 13y ago

"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?

danielharan 13y ago
Not said, but isn't that exactly what his cost cutting implies?
- ericd 13y ago
  No, because he wasn't cutting the medical benefits at all.
  - danielharan 13y ago
    Thanks!
  - mbreese 13y ago
    No, he was cutting benefits in general and used healthcare expenses as a rationale for it. This may be a good thing for the company's bottom line, but the optics are horrible. Even if the policy was sound (and I'm not sure it is), the delivery ruined it. It will be hard to say how he can be an effective leader at this point.
    - ericd 13y ago
      I don't see how you were disagreeing with me? He was making the 401k plan marginally worse, not cutting benefits in general. I wasn't saying anything about his ability to lead going forward, just that if their medical policy is going to continue to be willing to pay for these unusual events in the future that he probably doesn't view them as unacceptable.
      - mbreese 13y ago

judk 13y ago

AOL does pay health benefits, what happened was they cut 401k to maintain their comp budget. Rmember : Slate opinion blogs != journalism

saraid216 13y ago
Remember: HN comments != Accurate reflection of the OA's claims.

urethra 13y ago

I was LinkedIn stalked by AOL HR two days before this happened. I thought about doing the interview just to get back in the habit but ended up declining the invite and indicating Armstrong's hamfistedness was the reason why.

mindcrime 13y ago

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 man, based on a very limited understanding, and heavily influenced by their own preconceived biases and generic "Robber Barrons, evil, muwahahahaha" stereotypes. I'm not saying that Tim Armstrong is a good person, as I don't know him. But I am very suspicious of this rush to judgment that seems to be going on here.

anigbrowl 13y ago
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.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  All of that may, or may not, be true. But none of it addresses the issue I was questioning, which is how anybody can claim to understand "Tim Armstrong's attitude towards the lives of his employee's children" based on nothing more than this one news article. I'm saying we shouldn't be rushing to judgment, and creating this caricatured images of Armstrong (or anybody else) and basically screaming "off with his head", without sufficient information. Again, I don't know him... never met the guy in my life. He may be a complete douchebag and a total jackass for all I know. But it would be premature to conclude any of that from this story.
  - robhu 13y ago
    It's not based on 'one news article', it's based on something Armstrong said (and planned to say) which is /reported/ in a news article.

russtrpkovski 13y ago

AOL may be a self insured group where it pays all of the medical costs for its employees. The insurance company merely provides administrative services such processing claims and paying providers.

tiquorsj 13y ago
Or, like every other group they get rerated periodically based on claims.

tsotha 13y ago

>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. All he said is they changed the 401k plan because of unexpectedly high medical expenses. He didn't say or imply he wished they didn't save the baby. I can give the kid's mother a pass on two pages of disjointed emoting, but I don't understand why a disinterested observer would write something like you've written.

walshemj 13y ago

What I want to know is what was AOL doing with the money that it was supposedly buying insurance with was it not actually buying insurance but trying to self insure? and using the "insurance monney" to boost its books? The next Question is are the employees 401k's safe and accounted for or is Aol like Maxwell?

Shivetya 13y ago

I figure I am going balls deep into an internet tickle fight, but so be it. Its not AOL's or his responsibility. If anything you can put the cost onto society as a whole. This is the type of insurance the ACA should have been instead of the crap we got. It should have covered catastrophic care, which means million dollar babies provided they can be saved. No company should feel guilty not keeping up benefits because one or two cases blew the bank. They are not there to fix everything. Insurance is a benefit and benefits can be exhausted or become so costly that the cost of doing business means not being in business. So yeah, it sucks. Welcome to the world. The solution is to put catastrophic care into the hands of government and let them decide who gets the care. Let employers and everyday people shop for the best care for non catastrophic care and do it across state lines. Put them all on equal footing. So summary. 1) Government takes care of catastrophic care. They set the limits, the decide who. If you want more you buy it on the secondary market. 2) Individuals and business buy insurance from any/all provides regardless of state. The only rule is, preexisting conditions do not disqualify you. They can however put you into rule #1