Comments | siderea: [healthcare, econ/biz, soc, US, Patreon] A Hypothesis, Part 3: Money Flows Through It

siderea

[healthcare, econ/biz, soc, US, Patreon] A Hypothesis, Part 3: Money Flows Through It

Apr 13, 2015 15:05

This post moved to https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1183554.html

biz, us, soc, healthcare, econ, patreon

Comments 9

Comment Catcher siderea April 13 2015, 19:09:37 UTC

This is the comment catcher comment for catching comments.

typos alexx_kay April 13 2015, 21:37:36 UTC

"(not any more.)"
I think the period belongs outside the parens.

"they use the huge stream of incoming premiums as principle." and
"held as principle for investments"
Should be "principal". (I admit I had to look this up to be sure.)

Re: typos siderea April 13 2015, 21:59:40 UTC

Damn. It's rare for me to be just straight-up wrong about usage, but I'd thought it was "principle". I checked; you're right. Thanks for catching that!

Re: Comment Catcher nancylebov April 14 2015, 04:00:48 UTC

Only a vague memory, but I think Something Bad happened in the insurance business because a lot of their investments went sour. If my vague memory is correct, this was before the great recession.

ron_newman April 13 2015, 20:39:42 UTC

Unless you want to add a third category, "out of pocket" should also include all payments by patients whose insurance covers some or most, but not all, costs of care: copayments, "coinsurance", and deductibles.

siderea April 13 2015, 20:52:02 UTC

Yes, that's included in "out of pocket". I'd thought I'd made that clear, but on re-read apparently I edited that part out, oops. I'll go add something back in to clarify that. Thanks! ETA: fixed.

londo April 13 2015, 22:49:48 UTC

Not to detract from the content, but I'm fascinated by your ability to serialize a thing like this and post it. I could never publish part one of something like this without having written all the parts first.

siderea April 13 2015, 23:02:06 UTC

Neither could I. :D Most of it is written. Notice how there's no Siderea Posts Feb 27 to Mar 24? This is what I was up to.

It's not done, but enough of it is in fact done that the parts at this bit are subsequent drafts and occasional expansions. And occasionally shoving parts around.

I started this monster as I usually do, in emacs, and I found I couldn't manage it there - I literally would get lost in the document, and I couldn't keep track of the argument ("where did I make this point I want to refer to? Did I refer to it already or not?"). I wound up porting it into MS Word so I could use the Outline view, and that helped immensely.

Terminology sauergeek April 17 2015, 20:17:03 UTC

If you want to look into the investment of premiums, one term that might help look things up is 'float'. It's not just companies that hold money for a few months that take advantage of float. Even payroll companies like ADP -- who only have their wodge of money for a few days -- make investments with that money while they have it, and make some interest on it.