Look up Barrett's Esophagus and the recommended treatment for it.
451 karma · joined June 5, 2019
The goal was to protect against really bad things happening that would result in hospital bills of a million or more -- and screw up our retirement completely.
(We had private insurance because both of us retired early, and the early premiums were reasonable. Also, my wife had heard that Medicare was a bad insurance to have, and didn't want to take the risk she couldn't get the care she might need.)
It was that, after 65, you're supposed to be on Medicare. Period. And they way they enforce it is they charge you extra when you do finally get on it (presumably after your private insurance becomes just too expensive...)
I'd be delighted to be proven wrong, but we were told repeatedly, including by Medicare itself, we Shall Be Penalized.
There's always the possibility the MA will stall. If it's egregious, we'll need to look into legal alternatives.
Yes, both of us are over 65.
The insurance was a high end PPO with no lifetime max and $20 copay. My wife is a cancer survivor, and I take drugs to minimize my cancer risk.
Additionally, the premium growth rate accelerated considerably after 65.
We did not actually pay $85k for a year but that was going to be the price. We were told what the new premiums would be, and instead of paying the $85k (paid monthly in installments), I switched immediately to the MA plan and told my wife, let's see how this works out. She held on for six months, then ran into the stalling, and then it took her another six months before she could get on the same MA plan.
The reason our MA plan works is that it's offered by the same medical center we happened to use 100% of the time on our previous insurance. So we didn't need to switch any physicians.
Regarding predatory MA's, my wife's surgeon, who was trying to get the approval for her surgery, told her, "This isn't going anywhere, you're past the time to switch to medicare, get an MA. However, be sure you avoid these companies."
Yes, we switched to medicare late, and we are reminded of that every month when we pay the penalty.
(I should mention our current MA plan is a HMO, not a PPO -- my typo.)
It is effectively a PPO (similar to the Kaiser plan someone else mentioned), so we have access to exactly the same physicians that we had already where we were paying for private insurance. Our annual premiums went from about $85k a year (on the private insurance) to around $10k out of pocket.
We are fairly healthy, though my wife is going to have some major joint surgery. What was interesting is that it was our PRIVATE insurance that stalled and stalled over approving the surgery. When she switched to the MA plan, it was approved immediately. (That stalling finally motivated my wife to make the switch out of the private insurance.)
The downside of our MA plan is that we are not going to be able to move out of the area easily. But you always have that issue regardless -- finding a whole new set of doctors and dentists when you move...
I do get these phone calls asking to schedule a "wellness" check that the article writer mentions. Oddly enough, my wife didn't get any (so far.)
I'm not saying this is actually true -- it's just my hypothesis.
Maybe it's the hospital inflation applied to equipment?
5 bit Friden Flexowriter punching paper tape for coding in machine language. Coding sheets. Weird hexadecimal digits 0-9fgjkqw (it took me a while to adapt to 0-9a-f when I first saw them!) Ordering instructions so they'd appear under the drum reader when it was time to execute them. Spending hours debugging code to the point where I was flagged in the weekly publication as the person most likely to be on the computer.
The most amazing thing I ever saw on the LGP-30 was that someone had managed to implement floating point on it -- we got a chance to try it out near the end of our summer course. The second most amazing thing was a program to compute e to several thousand decimal places.
If it matters to communicate outside, sure. But if you're inside a synthworld with everyone at the same timebase, it's not a problem. Essentially, you're evolving 30,000x faster, so with enough minds in the synthworld, interesting things will happen...
In other words, don't use this site blindly.
8-)
However, and this is very amusing to me, it turns out that the process of automatic differentiation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation, the section on dual numbers) works in exactly the same way. Just replace all of the primed symbols (u', v', etc.) with du, dv, etc. and dual numbers are isomorphic to infinitesimals (if I'm using that term correctly.)
The standard joke is "Europeans refer to him by reference, as Nicklaus Wirth, and Americans - by value, as Nickel's Worth."