[Today’s run: white house 3.4 miles]<\/p>\n
politics!<\/p>\n
I have a good employer.\u00a0 My salary is not as high as it would be if I were working in a high-pressure environment.\u00a0 But a moderate salary is offset by lower pressure, and good perks, including a pension and a pretty good heath insurance coverage.<\/p>\n
We found out yesterday that they changed our prescription coverage this year.\u00a0 An expensive prescription that last year cost us $75 out of pocket will cost $320 this year.\u00a0 Ouch!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I talked to our benefits person in the HR department and she said they were trying to control costs.\u00a0 Makes sense.\u00a0 Lower the outlay and keep the premiums down.<\/p>\n
But there’s a lesson in it, I think.<\/p>\n
Insurance companies make money.\u00a0 They have buildings and telephones and all of the costs of a business.\u00a0 But they produce no widgets.\u00a0 The only money they “make” is by trying to find efficiencies in other people’s management practices.\u00a0 They may group doctors together, or get special deals on generic drugs, whatever.\u00a0 There’s no factory producing kewpie dolls, so that big insurance building comes from premiums which come from people who mostly don’t get sick paying just in case they do get sick. (They also make money through investing premiums in the financial markets, making interest on it until the day it is needed.)<\/p>\n
My family was getting a pretty nice deal, paying less per month.\u00a0 Our usage of the system was depending on the system being constructed a certain way.\u00a0 Everybody does that.\u00a0 If they make hospitalization treatment “cheaper” to me than outpatient, then I’d be glad to lay up in the hospital.\u00a0 That’s not rocket science.<\/p>\n
I was looking in our plan document.\u00a0 They have coverage for acupuncture.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ll bet if everyone at the office started to use acupuncture that would change.\u00a0 They couldn’t afford it anymore.<\/p>\n
People form their usage of the system in response to the system.\u00a0 And the system changes because of the usage.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: white house 3.4 miles] politics! I have a good employer.\u00a0 My salary is not as high as it would be if I were working in a high-pressure environment.\u00a0 But a moderate salary is offset by lower pressure, and good perks, including a pension and a pretty good heath insurance coverage. We found out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2126"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2128,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126\/revisions\/2128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}