> it's that kind of crap that drives me utterly mad. it's what joanna
> pointed out this already, including "retirement" planning: it increasingly
> requires more and more time to sift through reams of paperwork, dotting
> all the i's and crossing all the t's. and then you get punched with a bill
> a year later -- or whatever -- claiming some snafu which then requires
> that you sift through whatever paperwork you retained, make phone calls,
> write letters, follow up just to be sure you're not getting fucked around.
> i swear they do it on purpose figuring that, for every person who bothers
> to be vigilant about not getting fucked around, there are 3-4 more harried
> people who give up in despair.
Yep. This seems like another example of Wojtek's observations about the neolib ethic of generated inefficiencies requiring extra services and middlemen. You can, of course, pay somebody to keep tabs on your credit rating an all that, instead of carefully planning getting each of the three credit reports for free in a round robin every four months.
Posters on slashdot have observed that the phrase "identity theft" is a way of shifting the burden of what is really "bank fraud" onto a bystander.
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
> IIUC, this is the only thing in your list that would explain the jump in the
> bill I gave as an example: super routine bloodwork. It can't be the
> adminstrative cost, which is exactly the same or cheaper than it was 20
> years ago under the same plan. And it isn't that this is a case of high
> tech, non-preventive care or something caused by lifestyle issues.
This didn't get broken out in Woj's figures, but administrative costs get boosted by all the maneuvering providers have to do to make sure insurers pay them -- classifying treatment juuust the right way so that it's clear that it's necessary treatment, just for one example.
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 27, 2009, at 9:39 AM, Andy wrote:
>
>> One of the factoids I've seen floating around is that some huge
>> percentage of the cost is incurred in the last months of life
>
> Well yeah, but isn't that sort of like saying that a fire department spends
> most of its budget on burning buildings?
Yes, but the point is how much heroic care gets provided to people who are likely to soon die of something else. Not that I have a number for that.
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Jenny Brown <jbrown72073 at cs.com> wrote:
> On malpractice insurance, a lot of the motivation to sue is to ensure
> there's money to pay the health care costs of whatever got messed up in the
> malpractice. Without the fear of being swamped with medical costs, a lot of
> these lawsuits would go away, and the ones that didn't wouldn't have a
> medical care award component cause everyone's covered.
I've also heard pointed out that the lack of decent disability payments makes it necessary to shoot for a jackpot if you've been rendered unfit for paid work.
-- Andy