My head hurts from the first two and my gut hurts from laughing at the last one.

One of the ongoing factors in the Health Care battle in congress is the issue of pre-existing conditions (PECs). It’s one of those issues where it is hard to strike a compromise that is fair to both consumers that have PECs and the insurance companies (and, by extension, their customers).

On the other hand, if all pre-existing conditions are covered no matter what, there is little incentive to get health insurance until you need it and an incentive to get something high-deductable until you need an insurer that’s going to cover whatever it is that ails you. Some, such as Megan McArdle, argue that this is not really such an issue, but I would expect it to become a much larger one as people get accustomed to the idea that they cannot be denied insurance due to a PEC. As it stands, I know someone that was uninsured, needed surgery, and cheated a single-issue insurance company by not disclosing it.

On the one hand, if PECs are never covered, people who happen to get sick while ininsured are forever locked out of the system even if they’re uninsured for brief periods of time. Or even if you were insured at the time, but for one reason or another have to switch insurance carriers. Further, PECs are frequently used by insurance companies for the sake of rescission.

Rescission, for those of you that don’t know, is when a policy is retroactive vacated. Insurance companies claim to do this when a customer was not up-front about a PEC. The problem is that some of the PECs used to vacate policies are things that a customer doesn’t even know about or that does not strike someone as significant (particularly if it’s something that hasn’t come around in a while). For instance, someone with a family history of heart illness or that had an irregular heartbeat in 2003 could find his policy vacated in 2009 when the insurance company finds out and argues that it needed to be informed.

The current balance that has been struck is that as long as one has maintained consistent coverage without a lapse over 30/60/90 days, they cannot be denied coverage on the basis of a PEC. State laws vary as to what length of lapse is acceptable and how long PEC coverage can be denied. In Cascadia, you have to have a lapse for greater than 60 days or so and if you have one they can deny you for up to 12-18 months. Further, rescission is generally only available to single-issue policy holders. In other words, you generally are not cut lose when covered through your employer.

This strikes me as a not-unreasonable balance, though I’m not sure it’s sufficient or proportional.

To take an example from the Truman-Himmelreich household, there was a snafu in the paper work for Clancy’s COBRA coverage* that lead us to find out, more than 60 days after coverage lapsed, that she had not been covered. So by default, we’ve already got a lapse that prevents anything pre-existing from being covered for a year. And I believe Cascadia is the most generous state I’ve lived in as far as this goes. I don’t believe Delosians are similarly protected, though I could be wrong about that.

As mentioned above, you generally have to have some sort of penalty for people that let coverage lapse during health, but the difference between enrolling in 70 days and enrolling in 59 days should not be that dire. A more fair approach would be to say something like “PEC do not have to be covered for whatever time period one was uninsured.” So we would not have any PEC coverage for 70 days. That seems fair to me. We would not have an incentive to wait as long as we wanted until we needed it since the longer we waited the longer it would be before we were completely covered. As it stands, we would have to wait nearly as long (within six months, anyway) as someone that went five years without coverage.

Rescission is a tricker issue. On one hand, insurance companies ought to be able to deny people that cheat the system. People should not be able to do what my friend did. The law didn’t stop him, but that’s only because the insurance company did not know. Meanwhile, however, insurance companies have picked up the practice of taking someone’s money until they suddenly have need of the services offered and only after that investigating someone’s application form and finding some (alleged) discrepency.

If an insurance company is collecting someone’s money, they ought to be relatively assured that they have coverage. Only those cases where insurance companies have reason to believe that fraud is involved should they be able to rescind. Insurance companies say that’s what they’re doing now, but frankly I do not believe them. They have too much financial incentive to do otherwise.

My proposed solution to that would be similar to the previous. Once an insurance company has been collecting premiums for a specified period of time (I’m inclined to say six month or a year), they should not be able to rescind a policy. Someone that hasn’t made any substantial claims in a year but continues to pay their premiums has demonstrated a degree of good faith. Someone that needs knee surgery is not going to pay $300-800 a month for a year just to collect benefits. Someone that is at risk of a heart condition didn’t start buying insurance with the plan of having a heart attack in a year’s time.

Now, both of these cases would have an exclusion for outright fraud. The difference between that and now is that the insurance company would have to prove that any reasonable person would know that a PEC was relevant. In other words, a heart attack a year before the policy could be considered fraud, but a heart murmur four years prior would not. A pack-a-day smoker that does not disclose his habit would be game, but family history that may have escaped their mind would not. Beyond that, the insurance company has the option of paying for (or splitting the cost of) a complete physical rather than not worried about it until it suddenly becomes very convenient to do so.

The other issue at play is that as medical records become more electronic, it’ll become harder and harder for people to knowingly (or unknowingly) hide PECs. There are questions as to what the insurance companies should and should not have access to versus the right of doctor-patient privilege, though it could well be that a compromise could become that if a person submits all of their medical records that there can be absolutely no rescission. Right now it’s not easy to collect that information, but it’s one of those things that (for better or worse) is going to become a lot easier in the coming decades.

* – For those of you that don’t know about COBRA, it’s a pseudo-mandate by the government that requires insurance companies not to drop coverage if you lose your job. What happens is that you get COBRA paperwork after you lose your job (for any reason excluding malfeasance) and if you respond within 60 days and pay the bill, you’re retroactively covered.

The downside is that you have to foot the bill that your employer previously footed. In a case like mine, that’s diddly. But when employers are actually generous with their benefits, you can see your premiums jump three-fold or more, as was the case with Clancy. The other downside is that since COBRA was something that was thrust upon them by the government and the policy-holder’s employer, it’s not something that they’re excited about and it’s frequently the case that they don’t want your business.

On the other hand, President Obama’s stimulus package included a provision wherein the government will pick up 65% of the tab. For people like me, that means that COBRA is cheaper than penny-pinching employer-provided health care. For people that have more generous benefits like Clancy, though, it’s still going to cost more.

There is an electronic billboard on I-3 between Union City and Soundview that says something to the effect of “Fred Meyer, firing workers for one honest mistake is JUST WRONG”. I read that and I think “Right on!” I say this as someone that was fired from his first job for a some mistakes that were easily verified to have cost the customer nothing but whose accounting practices made it so their accountants got headaches. Long story. Anyway, I’m sympathetic to the grunts because it’s often the case, as it was at that theater, that the “right way” to do things slows everything down to a crawl and results in much worse customer service.

But here’s the thing that gives me hesitation: Fred Meyer has the absolute best cashiers of anywhere I have ever shopped on a regular basis. To take last night, for instance, I was on my way home from a late-night trip to Walmart. It took an insanely long time to check out because of a $1 sale on kid’s clothes that apparently hadn’t been put in the computers. The result is that one manager had to go between five different check-out lines and okay every single sale purchase. Given that they were selling kid’s clothes for a dollar, that was a whole lot of moving around. That type of thing doesn’t happen often at Walmart, but it does happen. It’s not yet happened at Safeway, but the Safeway employees are almost aggressively apathetic. Individually I think that they are actually worse than Walmart’s, but their systems are considerably less likely to be screwed up (at least in part because Safeway limits their sales to a narrower selection of goods than Walmart or, for that matter, Fred Meyer).

Fred Meyer, though, is a dream. Whereas at Safeway I have to make absolute sure that I have all of my items grouped according to how I want them bagged and even then they often seem to cherry-pick from my piles almost randomly. Never, ever happens at Fred. In fact, if I just dump everything into a pile because I don’t have time to sort them, half of the time they will sort them for me. They’ll pick the freezer stuff and put it together and even subdivide the fridge stuff into cheese, meat, and other. They don’t always do this, but they seem to over half the time.

I don’t know if Fred pays their workers any more than Walmart does theirs. If they do, of course, they have more righteous grounds to say that they’re paying a premium for absolutely no mistakes. But it could also be the case that Fred Meyer has a more freewheeling atmosphere that would trust their employees to charge $1 for kid clothes without requiring a manager for every single item. If that’s the case, then it is even more important that they enforce fewer mistakes to get a better caliber of worker than places that where the cashiers have less margin of error. In other words, if I want employers not to have the sorts of policies that the theater had that gave the employees no ability to compensate for a customer changing their mind on something or simply to correct their mistakes, it also stands to reason that they could demand that fewer mistakes be made.

So… I guess I’m not sure I want Fred to change their employment practices until or unless it results in a shortage of employees. Cause I sure seem to benefit from the results.

I happened to catch this story on the Today Show this morning:

Lauren Johnson is a typical 12-year-old girl – except that she can’t stop sneezing.

It is so bad that she sneezes up to 20 times a minute, or 12,000 times a day.

The non-stop sneezing began two weeks ago when Lauren from Virginia in the U.S. caught a cold.

Lauren can’t go to school and is even struggling to eat.

The only relief she gets is when she falls asleep each night. Her condition has left doctors baffled.

Cynically, my first thought was that she simply figured out how to sneeze on cue and is faking it (particularly since it doesn’t happen in her sleep), but she sold me during the interview. Not only does she look miserable, but she looks a particularly disconcerted sort of miserable that I don’t know a twelve year old would think to use.

What really stuck out in the story was all of the tasteless puns TTS was throwing out there. Pretty tacky.

8:30: “Ready to eat? I am. Let’s drive around downtown Gemini Falls and see what’s out there? If we don’t find anything, maybe we’ll eat at one of the city’s four Thai places. Surely we will run across one of them.”

8:45: “Hmmm. Okay. Maybe we’re missing something. Let’s consult the GPS.”

8:46: “Why is the GPS acting so buggy lately?”

9:15: “I swear, I’ll find my way out of the university one of these days. Did you happen to notice when we actually entered the university?”

9:35: “Down that way is a Dark Road. Having already been down two Dark Roads tonight, let’s not go down that one.”

9:55: “Hey, there’s our hotel. How did we end up back here? Okay, so no Thai place. Let’s see if there’s anthing that appeals to us.”

10:05: “Ssshhh… if you listen really closely, you can hear our culinary expectations shatter.”

When I heard about this video, I was under the impression that some sort of fight broke out. I have to confess that I was smitten with the idea of Mormon soccer girls gone wild (except with punching rather than the Hammy tearing off of their shirts), but the BYU girls were the victims over and over again. and there really was only one transgressor that was just mowing everybody down.

If this type of thing were more common, college girl sports would be much more popular.

Not the most dynamic of videos, but nonetheless a fun cover of one of my many favorite They Might Be Giants songs.

All of my “Incoming Links” on the WordPress dashboard are “links” from Technarati. I follow the links and there is no link to this site.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, but in the past it’s almost always been fake blogs. By “fake blogs” I mean that they seem to be computer-generated or if not that then extremely lazy blogs that basically take a couple paragraphs of content and are really heavy on advertising. Basically, cheap attempts to make money. In the past there was an issue with lazy bloggers trying to get your attention (this is back when I was higher profile – and under my real name – than I currently am).

But following the links, they don’t seem lazy link-gathering and advertical profiteering. Rather, there is genuine content… that has nothing to do with anything I’ve written about and that contain no links to my site.

Has Technarati signed with a cyberpublicist that promises more visitors? It got me to read a few Technarati entries that I otherwise wouldn’t have. That’s the only idea I have.

1) If a man is still single when he is 32, he is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) A beta who is shafted by women’s perpetual pursuit of alphas
(b) A victim of feminism
(c) Probably a really nice guy who can’t seem to find a woman because they’re all busy dating alphas and jerks.
(d) An alpha who has access to any woman he wants and so does not need to marry
(e) Wisely foregoing an institution so ridiculously lopsided in favor of women.

2) If a woman is still single when she is 32, she (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Is obviously obsessed with alphas and that’s why she can’t find a man.
(b) Is stuck up and has standards set way too high.
(c) Is captive of the feminist ideology about fish and bicycles.
(d) A whale
(e) Is the mother of some kids to some alpha she slept with while spurning betas
(f) Has something seriously, seriously wrong with her.

3) If a man cheats on a woman, she is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Culpable because she obviously married an alpha and could have avoided this fate by marrying a nice guy that would have been faithful.
(b) Culpable because she is a harpy that drove her otherwise nice guy to cheat on her.
(c) A victim of feminism as it pertains to the sexual revolution that entitled the man to act on his base instincts the same ways that women always do.

4) If a woman cheats on a man, she is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Destroying her family for the chance to sleep with an alpha.
(b) Showing her true, ugly nature and disproving once and for all that women are more sexually restrained than men out of some sense of morality.
(c) Demonstrating the failures of feminism by placing woman empowerment over the value of family and moral values

5) If a woman leaves a man that cheats on him, she is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Demonstrating the failures of feminism by placing female empowerment over the values of family and morality.
(b) Culpable because she obviously married an alpha and could have avoided this fate by marrying a nice guy that would have been faithful. Now, she’s only added to her culpability by allowing her original mistake to result in the dissolution of a family.
(c) Only leaving because feminism will allow her to sit around eating bon-bons and smoking cigarettes while he gets every last free dime he has taken in child support and (where applicable) alimony.

6) If a woman leaves a man that cheats on her, he is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Being punished for following his biological impulses the same way that women always do.
(b) A victim of the court system which will probably use his infidelity to limit his access to the children and take every last free dime he has by taking it for child support and (where applicable) alimony.

7) If a woman does not leave a man that cheats on her, she is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Proof positive that women are attracted to assholes.
(b) Only sticking around so that she can hold it over his head and control him all the much more.
(c) To blame for any future infidelity since she rewarded his immoral behavior.

8) If a woman does not leave a man that cheats on her, he is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Screwed.
(b) Going to have it held over his head.
(c) Probably going to be forced to stop sleeping with other women because she fails to recognize that he has BIOLOGICAL NEEDS.

9) If a woman marries a nice and faithful guy, she is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Use him for his money and/or platonic companionship and cheat on him with an alpha.
(b) Use him until she can find what she wants and leave him for an alpha after the first opportunity.
(c) Going to secretly have an alpha’s baby and pretend that it’s his.
(d) Visibly and desperately unhappy.
(e) Fooling herself into thinking she’s happy while she pines away for an alpha.

10) If a woman marries a guy that turns out not to be faithful, she (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Is proof positive that women are attracted to assholes.
(b) Turned him into an asshole because she’s a harpy.
(c) Drove him to it by having the audacity to age.

11) If a woman stays at home to raise the kids, she (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Is a lazy user who married the dupe so that she wouldn’t have to work so that she could sit around and eat bon-bons all day.
(b) Is proof positive that women will only marry rich men.

12) If a woman stays at home to raise the kids, he is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) A dupe who is being used for his money
(b) Being cheated on by his wife who is sleeping with the pool-boy, outlaw biker, or an investment banker while he’s gone.

13) If a woman works after having children, she (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Is putting her own petty career aspirations ahead of the needs of the family.
(b) Chose to marry a low-IQ bum rather than someone with money that would have allowed her to stay home.
(c) Is proof positive of how feminism has destroyed the institution of family.
(d) Is cheating on him with a pool-boy, outlaw biker, or investment banker.

14) If a woman is thin and attractive, she (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Is a stuck-up b*tch.
(b) Will only sleep with alphas even though betas would treat her far better.

15) If a woman is not thin and attractive she is (circle one or more of the following):
(a) A whale
(b) Worthy of contempt

16) Women who sleep with a lot of men are (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Exhibit A in the destruction of sexual morality thanks to the feminists.
(b) A slut.
(c) A hypocrite.

17) Women who sleep with few men (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Are obviously holding their standards way too high as they wait for an alpha when they could have a super-nice beta who would treat them like a princess
(b) Are fat or ugly
(c) A religious hypocrite because she would totally sleep with Brad Pitt if given the opportunity proving that it has nothing to do with sexual morality and everything to do with thinking that she’s better than all the men she won’t sleep with.

18) A man who wants to put “none of the above” for any of the above questions (circle one or more of the following):
(a) A dupe brainwashed by feminism
(b) A dupe brainwashed by liberalism
(c) A dupe brainwashed by political correctness
(d) A self-loathing man
(e) A nice guy too nice to realize that the above (and feminism more broadly) is to blame for his lack of success
(f) A nice guy who lets his relative success with women (and the relative/eventual success of those he knows) blind him to the obvious truth

19) A woman who wants to put “none of the above” for any of the above questions (circle one or more of the following):
(a) Hates men
(b) Is brainwashed by feminism, liberalism, and/or political correctness
(c) Is a slut
(d) Hates nice guys

If you’re looking for a defender of Cash for Clunkers, you’re not going to find it with me. I’m not against it in theory if I thought that it could do what its supporters said it would do. I don’t like the idea of taking functional cars off the road and I think that the money would have been better spent elsewhere. However, there is one argument against C4C encapsulated in this article that I consider to be pretty problematic: The notion that it has made el cheap-o entry-level cars too expensive for people without much money:

The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index reported that prices reached record highs in September. The consulting firm that publishes the index blamed low inventories.

That’s bad news in Berks, where many shoppers seek inexpensive, used vehicles, especially during difficult economic times, said George Tabakelis, general manager of Perry Auto Service & Sales on Route 61 in Perry Township.

“Customers used to be able to find a good car for their son or daughter to take to college for $2,000 or $3,000, but now that same car may cost $5,000,” Tabakelis said. “It’s sad.”

He, too, blames cash for clunkers, which has led to fewer vehicles being available at used-car auctions, and the recession.

The cars that C4C is taking off the road are those that are old and get less than 18mpg. So for people looking for cheap, entry-level, high-mileage old cars with poor mileage, their hunt got a little bit tougher and more expensive. So for bigger cars, trucks, SUVs, and low-mileage muscle cars, C4C has become tougher. However, those aren’t college student outfitters (except perhaps bigger cars). This article (as well as numerous conservative, libertarian, and anti-Obama commentators) implies that this applies to the most basic of entry-level cars. Like the old Dodge Colt or Chrysler LeBaron that I used to drive. Those aren’t being scrapped.

The LeBaron got around 25 miles to the gallon and the Colt got 30 until the day it died. The only vehicles in our family history that would be eligible would be the vans and the convertible, neither of which are “college cars” (and I have my doubts that the convertible would have been eligible because even though it got very poor mileage, I think the model itself got good mileage and I think that eligibility is determined by model and year).

The only really good argument that C4C made college cars more expensive is that by taking old SUVs and station wagons off the road, it forced people that would buy those to instead buy smaller cars, increasing demand on those cars and driving the price up. I’m not really sure how much of a factor that is, though. People that get low-mileage vehicles typically do so for a reason. When it’s necessitated by extra cargo space or passenger capacity, smaller vehicles don’t do them any good and so they’ll likely bite the bullet and get something a little more expensive. It’s a bit murkier with people that wanted a 1990 Ford Mustang or Taurus but instead must make due with an Escort. Those people may drive the price of Escorts up a little bit, but you can still get a 90’s Ford Escort for $2,500. Clint got an early-90’s Toyota Corolla for less than $1,000 and it runs great. Even if Crayola, my late-90’s Ford Escort, were running well, I wouldn’t expect more than a couple thousand for it.

For those noticing an uptick in the cost of entry-level used vehicles, it’s possible that C4C is playing a marginal role in it through a cascading effect, but to that extent so is the economy as a whole on models completely unaffected by the program. The article above actually points out that fewer new car sales are making barely-used car sales more expensive. As I’ve been car shopping for the last several months, I’ve noticed the price differential between low-usage used cars and new cars has shrunk to become pretty marginal (and I say this as someone that never intended to buy new).

Back to the original point, as much as I’d like to blame a government program that I never really liked for an undesirable turn of events, I’m afraid I just don’t buy into the notion that Cash for Clunkers, despite its various flaws, has priced people out of the entry-level cars that they need. It may have priced them out of the entry-level cars that they want, if they wanted a Ford Taurus or a truck of some sort, but for the poor cash-strapped college student depicted in the article, they have other options.