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no_such_reality
ParticipantBorrowed money used to be evaluated as something you paid back
Now borrowed money isn’t paid back, it’s perpetually financed at near zero real rates with the future transference of the bad debt to the central governments which is then perpetually financed
ParticipantThey can’t fix it because the fix is “big guvment” and meddling regulations that would prevent things like Shrekeli doing what he did and Mylar doing what it does and other doing what their doing with coupons. It also requires plans to be able to say limited no. Item. Certain drugs aren’t covered until other options are exhausted.
I used UHG as an example since they provide a plethora of health related services but other than their pharmacy operations don’t provide actual health services. We’re taking 35% of our health dollars off before it even gets to the actual providers
As for the people they’re stuck believing the problem is freeloaders, bad choicers, and government bereaucracy akin to zootopia’s sloth filled DMV
The reality is our system has too many layers, too much administrative conplexity and too many profit levels coupled with a relatively unhealthy population
Our prior system is great if you’re not oldish, not sick, or covered by a decent employer provided plan other wise it pretty much sucked shit
Participant[quote=SK in CV][quote=no_such_reality]
For major health insurance companies like United Health Group cost of services is 65%. Profit, administration, marketing, etc is 35%. UH is a fairly good company.[/quote]
Not sure where those numbers are coming from. By law, the medical loss ratio for qualified health plans must be at least 80% for individual and small group policies and 85% for large group policies. If MLR is lower than those numbers, premiums must be rebated.
Not an entirely fair comparison since Medicare spends almost nothing on premium collection or sales, but Medicare overhead is less than 2%[/quote]
It comes from UHG’s 10-K. It’s across all their business lines. The ACA law requires the 80% to be for health care claims and quality improvements for credible plans.
The part that is really obscured is how much of the cost of providing services, the part paid to providers, is administrative costs from dealing with all the different insurance companies, billing requirements and authorizations etc.
I don’t think there will be clear numbers between the efficiency/inefficiency of the Government bureaucracy versus private corporation bureaucracy and inefficiency and induced bureaucracy in the providers.
Participant[quote=Reality][quote=harvey]
Why would a third of total healthcare spending just disappear simply because the government is paying the bill instead of insurance companies or private consumers?
[/quote]Don’t know about a third, but spending will go down just because the government will pay less than commercial insurance, just like Medicare does now.[/quote]
For major health insurance companies like United Health Group cost of services is 65%. Profit, administration, marketing, etc is 35%. UH is a fairly good company.
[quote=livinincali]
I’m not saying free market system don’t have their consequences. Every system has in consequences to various degrees. In very socialized system you wait a long time for elective procedures or you don’t get them at all. In other system you die if you can’t pay and charity refuses to save you. In our system everyone gets treated and almost everyone has access to the latest and best procedures but at a tremendous cost.
Our system’s biggest problem is it doesn’t allow for free market forces to force competition and drive down costs.
[/quote] I think the population of the country have been pretty clear about letting people die on hospital door steps. We just have a mental schism regarding paying for it.
My last trip to the ER pre-ACA had six people in the ER while I was there. It was pretty clear I was the only person with insurance coverage. A couple scans and couple hours and we shouldn’t be surprised the bill showed up north of $20,000…
Given our society’s view, IMHO, the solution is to provide basic health care via single payer like Medicare to all that coverage your basic health services, maintenance for illnesses and proven cost efficient services for things like cancer.
Elective insurance for things like proton therapy, ‘conceirge’ doctors, PPO like services, short wait times, etc.
Participant[quote=ocrenter]
But 38% of America doesn’t see the irony. They see this as just another attack on their president.
.[/quote] I don’t know what they see. I get the irony, but really, this is just non-story. That’s the problem. Bang, bang, bang, beat the trite drum.
I get it, he’s vain, a bully, fake newsies and for ___ sake can someone on his staff please slap the twitter feed out of his hand.
The media is harping on it, all the left leaning facebook groups and jumping and howling, but it’s just trite crap.
Yes, IMO he’s shaping up to be a miserable President and even worse representation of humanity, but frankly the way his opponents behave is leaving little assurance that they’ll be any better other than they won’t be a 70+ year old apparent bigot. It’d just be a different more PC tyranny.
ParticipantNo details but it appears from April 2009 thru Dec 2011 for California as a whole, refinances thru HARP were 9% of the volume.
In 2012/2013 it appears for California that it’s more 15-20% of total refinances were HARP and roughly 50% of those were >105% LTV. Some interesting tables in their report. I can’t seem to find the same report for the 2012/2013 time period.
https://www.fhfa.gov/AboutUs/Reports/ReportDocuments/RefinanceReport_1Q2016.pdf
ParticipantYea, I agree, it’s all speculation. Interesting from a macro-economic impact standpoint. Personally, sans a major change in the lending environments, end result is we are still where we are at today. The dip might have been a lot steeper, but the climb out even faster, possibly overshooting due to fear of price out.
Is there any visibility into how many in San Diego or any other county had their loans modified via the various HARPs? It’s a semi-stand in for homes that didn’t come to market.
ParticipantWas it distressed inventory clearing or credit freeing up that drove the market back up? Serious question and I’m not being argumentative.
I don’t think banks were hiding their inventory, I think they weren’t acting on their inventory. I also think their incompetence in dealing with distressed assets actually played to their eventual benefit as efficient processing of everything in their pipeline would, IMO, have much more greatly impacted the market.
The short sale we bought and others we bid on are all good examples. For our house, we were the 2nd round bidders after the first short sale fell through after nearly 6 months. Our bid then took another 6 months reach a deal and then close. Having meet the owners, they moved out of the house at the beginning of the first deal and quit making payments close to a year before the first deal to force the banks hand on the short sale.
Other short sales situations were similar were we talked with owners and they’d simple quit making payments and the banks basically ignored them.
Meanwhile, on an open house, I’d be standing in line to get in to see the property.
I even looked at some of the banks foreclosure listings, I couldn’t buy them. Literally, could not get anyone to talk to me about an individual listing. I was ready with 100% cash for the place, couldn’t get people to return a call.
So I agree, they were not hiding their stuff, they were just incompetent. Sadly, they were like a person trying to lose 5 lbs, they kept plugging away at the five pounds and slowly watched their weight crawl up to 400 lbs.
I still tend to think if that backlogged inefficient under performing assets would have been acted on in a more timely manner how much worse it would have made it.
June 20, 2017 at 8:37 AM in reply to: OT: automation and robotics as manufacturing job killers #806930Participantspdrun Bye-bye 80-90% of those office white collar jobs
If it wasn’t clear I meant 80-90% of those jobs, not the entire departments. Many of those I’ve listed I’ve already done the beginning steps of the automation roll-outs that trimmed their staffs.
Accounting? Expense report receipts? You’re kidding, credit card integrated automated expense tracking and reporting through software. If you can’t enter your one-off receipts, your department admin maybe will help you if you’re a good producer, otherwise your manager’s manager is telling them to tell you to pull your head out of your *ss.
HR? Employee self service portals, automated background checks, automated hiring screening that frankly does a better job than any but the most specialized HR recruiter.
And we could talk about the fact the 5 person HR system development team that did all the software updates and stuff is bye-bye replaced by an 3rd party provider, the provider had couple hundred customers our size and basically all of them cut their HRiS development staff, the 3rd party company was like 500 people in total, management, sales, every body.
Right now all those people rolled around and went to the growth field in app development for and internet but IMO, there is massive levels of redundancy being built.
Seriously:
Letgo, Wallapop, Craigslist/Pro, Ebay, Carosell, Decluttr, VarageSale, not to mention Amazon, Ebay and Facebook.
Consolidation is coming. Self service is here. It’s about relationships going forward and 80-90% of todays white collar ‘grunt’ work jobs are all going bye-bye.
June 19, 2017 at 7:36 PM in reply to: OT: automation and robotics as manufacturing job killers #806920Participant[quote=carlsbadworker]I think some of the comments are short-sighted. Yes, automation and robots are going to kill manufacturing jobs and retail jobs, but so what? That doesn’t mean overall jobs are going to decline.
[/quote] Retail and Manufacturing? Try white collar. Bye-bye 80-90% of those office white collar jobs.
Accounting, bye-bye.
Human Resources, bye-bye.
Tech Support, bye- bye.
Customer Service Positions, bye-bye.
Legal support positions, bye-bye.
R&D, yep, lots of mid and low level stuff going bye-bye. Automation is seriously letting Pharma consolidate R&D staff.
Tax departments, bye-bye.
Medical support, bye-bye (robots already reading x-rays and results).True creating positions and sales positions will remain, but a lot of the positions doing the grunt work under the creative designers is going out.
Those people may still be employed, they may even still do something similar to related to it, but they’ll be in a very different organizational structure likely will be either gigging it or trying a startup.
May 31, 2017 at 7:39 AM in reply to: San Diego real estate is very undervalued compared to rent #806771Participant[quote=spdrun]Either housing is undervalued or rents are overvalued. See also: NYC, SF.[/quote]
Or borrowing money is dirt cheap.
ParticipantIF the fall rent was $2000 and May rent is only $2200, that’s really soft for the beach IMHO.
If you want to live at the beach, you rent in November, if you want to get sheared like a sheep, you look to rent at the beach in May.
Participant[quote=flu][quote=harvey][quote=no_such_reality]The market is snoozing because they know this is Trump’s trial balloon and not an actual proposal or anything else that as even a margin of a chance of passing.[/quote]
It’s not a “trial balloon” – it’s a loose collection of unworkable ideas that have superficial appeal to his base.
Trump will never actually make a formal proposal on taxes, on healthcare, on anything big.
Because he’s dug himself into a huge hole by making outrageous and completely unfeasible promises. It’s the same old Republican themes amplified by Trumpian-level bullshit: lower taxes while reducing the deficit while increasing military spending…with a few Trump extras like increasing infrastructure spending.
He can’t make an actual proposal with these parameters because it would be laughably bad, and the the last thing he wants is to be accountable.
So he’ll defer it to congress, like he did with healthcare. It will flounder and Trump will blame everyone else.
This is the “leadership” we are going to see for the next four years.[/quote]
And exactly nothing is going to get done… I love it!
Flu, out (mic drop)[/quote]
LOL, harvey I have to give you that one. I didn’t go look at what the WH actually provided until this morning. I looked at what all the media sources were saying.
What are they all reporting on? That’s barely a collection of campaign wishes.
ParticipantThe market is snoozing because they know this is Trump’s trial balloon and not an actual proposal or anything else that as even a margin of a chance of passing.
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