Science, Technology & Health: November 2015 Archives
UnitedHealth Group is warning that it might withdraw from Obamacare by 2017 because it's losing too much money. I'm sure the warning is legit, but it should really be viewed as a negotiation gambit.
The company admits it's "a potentially huge blow" to the new system: "If a major publicly traded insurer bows out, others may follow and destabilize the entire individual market."Game over for ObamaCare?
UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley seems to imply just that: "We can't really subsidize a marketplace that doesn't appear at the moment to be sustaining itself."
As Megan McArdle points out writes about the potential for an Obamacare death spiral, but of course she's cautious in making predictions.
An earnings call like today's can also be a bargaining tactic. Health insurers are engaged in a sort of perpetual negotiation with regulators over how much they'll be allowed to charge, what sort of help they'll get from the government if they lose money, and a thousand other things. Signaling that you're willing to pull out of the market if you don't get a better deal is a great way to improve your bargaining position with legislators and regulatory agencies.That said, strategic positioning is obviously far from the whole story, or even the majority of it. UnitedHealth really is losing money on these policies right now. It really is seeing something that looks dangerously like adverse selection.
No matter how you look at it, the news isn't good for the Affordable Care Act.
Elephants live as long as humans and they don't get cancer. Obviously we need to create human-elephant hybrids.
"Half of all men and a third of all women will develop cancer in their lifetime," said study author Dr. Joshua Schiffman, an investigator at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah. "The uncontrolled cell division and genomic instability that is cancer is very much a disease of aging, because the older we get the less we're able to repair damaged cells."Because elephants "are 100 times our size, and have so many cells, and live for such a long time, it stands to reason that just by chance alone all elephants should be dying from cancer. But they don't," said Schiffman. ...
Analysis of zoo elephant death records revealed that less than 5 percent died of cancer. The cancer death rate in humans is 11 to 25 percent, the researchers said.
