Showing posts with label Self Insured. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Self Insured. Show all posts

Thursday, February 6, 2014

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong – Corporate “Dick” of the Year Award!




This clown CEO of a Model T Internet Server – Yes AOL is still in in business. He does the self-insured thing on HealthCare for the employees. Two “females” have difficult births. Two Million in costs and guess what (?) – Management takes the cost overrun out of the other employees 401K funds and their payouts.  Whatever.  (401Ks BTW – Business’ convenient slush funds)

How do you spell "whalebone corset"?


“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,” Armstrong said. “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.” Under the new program, AOL employees will not be able to collect any matching funds toward their retirement savings from the company for any given year if they leave before Dec. 31 of that year.

But health care experts ThinkProgress contacted questioned why a large self-insured company with more than 5,000 employees could not absorb the additional health care costs associated with the pregnancies. Large employers typically purchase reinsurance, which could cover a substantial share of big claims and ensure stability in cases of larger-than expected medical payouts.

“The Affordable Care Act is simply a convenient whipping boy for any decision an employer makes to cut benefits,” Tim Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee, said. “Assuming AOL had reasonably generous coverage like most large employers, it should not have experienced any significant changes in its benefit structure for 2014. Perhaps it had to pick up a few more employees that had not been covered before or reduce premiums for a few employees, but it is hard to see $7.1 million here.”




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Friday, June 1, 2012

Catholic Charities – an Oxymoron?


I believe the Prince Bishop Dolan the other day was on the Martin Bashir news hour on MSNBC and threatened to close shop on his NYC Charity racket if the black man in the White House did not give into his imperial demands for privilege and entitlement and the right to deny female employees chemical/medications also known as contraception.

As I understand it, taxpayer money is used for some social services and or charities and administered by Dolan’s charity racket that gets to skim off a percentage of the cash as profit - fees.

In a way, I do not know how all this got started, the church in the secular social services “charity” distribution stuff.

Everything in NYC seems to have to function and operate along the mob business model with the alpha organization getting a cut before distribution to the general population whether it be food, petrol, education or even charity.

It is a strange thing. I seem to remember forty years back in Philly when I was still more or less Catholic (less) and I read about the local annual Catholic Charities Appeal that was exclusively a charity by Catholics only and for Catholics.  I remember reading at the time that the majority of the monies collected were going for construction of nursing homes. The question arose as to why.  

The answer dictum ex cathedra via Cardinal Krol was that the nursing homes were needed to house the parents of priests and nuns. The premise being that the Charity had to take care of these elderly people or else the priests and nuns would have to exit their jobs and do so privately. And since it was post Vatican II, there was a mass exodus to the doors already of the clergy and religious. Made perfect Catholic sense at the time.

That charity these days to Catholics as a base is paid for by secular tax dollars and beyond that “charity” goes to non-Catholics? Who designed this fucked up Rube Goldberg charity system/racket?  George Bush?

Fast forward forty years.  I think I have read that the Prince Bishop Dolan’s bailiwick and the mob’s Catholic bailiwick in Brooklyn are self-insured in the healthcare thingy – cutting out corporate healthcare insurance middle men.  Strange that Prince Bishop Dolan wants the Prez to drop a standard that his employees might demand under self-insurance.

This whole social services thing, administered with add ons to the Catholic Charities business model and organization, mixes a small few percentage points of Catholic money with a majority percentage of secular taxpayer money and it is still called Catholic Charities.  Why is that?

Catholic Charities – an Oxymoron? 


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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Is Mitt Romney Self-Insured for his Healthcare?

Self-Insured Mitt Romney?

With his refusal to participate in Medicare, where does Mitt Romney get his healthcare?  He, like all the rich self-insure themselves.  Some interesting questions here.


Are his children working or just living off the family fortune stolen at Bain Capital? That’s five sons and sixteen grandchildren in need of healthcare protection.  But the rich are not like the rest of us. 

Self insurance is little more than putting aside cash for emergencies and drawing down on it in time of need.  Statistically and like any insurance company, the odds and amounts are fairly predictable. In the case of a Romney, he goes to a hospital and pays and or negotiates what he is willing to pay and the hospital accepts or renegotiates the offer etc.  Cheaper than going through middle men health care providers sometimes. And take a tax loss when the medical bills get really high.  Just like business bookkeeping. Win-Win for the rich. 


I see in the below article that Mitt does not treat healthcare premiums on his income taxes as real healthcare as much as he treats it as a nuisance tax to claim residence in Massachusetts that under RomneyCare, health insurance is a mandated law.

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/the-tax-deduction-mitt-romney-did-not-take/


Why all the secrecy about Mitt’s wealth and how it works for him and how if elected President, he can scrap Medicare because he is too rich to care about the rest of the citizens of a republic?

Kind of reminds me of 2008 when he was running and one journalist asked his sons if they were going to serve their country in the military.  Their response was that they were serving their country by working in Mitt’s campaign.  Geez.  Milk.  Cookies.  Mormons and the death of civility, reality and patriotism in America.

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