I think I'm antsier than in years past for this season to start. I assume it's got something to do with a season starting while I'm actually in Minnesota for the first time in years, but whatever the reason, I'm ready for this to get underway.
96 thoughts on “February 21, 2017: Ready For Baseball”
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I had a health scare earlier this year (which was cleared up), but now I'm lost in the byzantine world of medical billing. Anyone who thinks that we have the 'best' system is either full of shit or just hasn't had the pleasure of spending hours on the phone sorting out what is and isn't covered by their monthly premiums. I have some of the best insurance in the state, and yet this encounter with the health industrial complex cost me more than a grand out of pocket. Now get the hell off my lawn.
Argh! There is nothing worse than having to call the hospital billing department when you think something should have been covered. (Its easier when you're just calling to set up a payment plan, at least.) Every time I have to do that, I am told I need to call the insurance provider, who tells me, no, its the hospital you need to talk to, who tells me, no, its the insurance provider....
I'm now off the phone with the Doc's office who just informed me that because it was a "screening" the billing codes have now changed and that I may be due a refund of my deductible. WTF!?!?!?!?!?!?! The fracking procedure was done, the Doc's time was used, the technicians time was used, the nurses time was used, but now you're telling me that the charges could be lessened? Do they get a pay cut because it was only a "screening". This is nuts.
I imagine they get theirs still, its just that theirs will come from the insurer instead of you.
IIRC, one part of the ACA was to make various preventive care (e.g., screenings) "free" (sans deductible, even) to the customer. Doesn't make them free in fact, just no marginal cost to the customer. I'm not sure how widely those requirements go beyond individual policies and small-group policies, however. (correction; the article makes it clear that it applies to all private plans)
Yeah, but ask about any actual concern while there for your preventative and wave goodbye to your deductible.
I suspect our lawns are adjacent, meat. (And I'm sorry to hear about your health trials & the costs incurred. Well wishes on both fronts.)
Mrs. Hayes got very, very sick shortly after we bought our house. In the span of a year she had five surgeries & four hospitalizations. She had to quit working, and I was in grad school, so we were forced to use COBRA insurance to the tune of $1200 month for over a year. As COBRA ran out the federal ACA exchange was opening. Getting coverage through the exchange was a nightmare, but once it kicked in our insurance costs were halved. A few months later I took a full-time gig and cut our insurance cost by another two thirds. Our coverage is better now than when we were paying $1200 a month, and we pay a little over one sixth of that cost (yes, I know there's an employer contribution; it's probably not $975/month). I suspect we came very close to losing our house on top of the medical debt we're still paying off.
My little brother got very sick when he was 22 months old. By the mid-Nineties my mom & Pa were over fifty grand in medical debt on one teacher's salary. (Mom had to quit her job to take care of little bro.) I still don't know how they made it, though I remember the meals we ate to get there.
I am interested in your trials with insurers and what they will cover ....
I had my first run-in with the nightmare of hospital billing last year, my son was admitted for a few days. So many bills, so many line items; I had a brief scare when the insurance company sent a letter in error saying that the hospital was out of network as well. Super fun.
We've been on my wife's insurance plan for 4 years and of course last year's out of pocket max doubled before dropping back down to the previous level for 2017. Would have saved us thousands of dollars if the hospitalization happened any other year.
Oh man tell me about it. In the last few months of her life, Elaine was constantly at Doctor/hospital. We also went through 3 insurance policies in 4 months. I bet it took me 3 months after she died to figure out bills, which day of service belonged to each policy etc.
I'm an educated guy who had time do deal with this over my lunch hour, I can't imagine how someone without my advantages would've figured it all out. Oh and 2 years after her passing, Medica did an audit and figured out they overpaid one bill by $1200. That came out of my pocket. Ouch!
I should add two things.
1. We had excellent insurance. Everything was covered and our deductible was managable. But it's complicated stuff, especially with literally 10-12 different providers. She probably had over $1 million in bills and I had out of pocket less than $4,000 with most of that covered by a FSA, VEBA, etc.
2. Medica was really helpful. Maybe because we were dealing with a deceased person and there was some sympathy there, but at one time a Medica person personally did a detailed internal audit to help figure all this out. Again, I was able to ask the right questions, point out differences in coverages, etc. Someone could've easily been overwhelmed.
Still, it takes a tremendous amount of corporate inhumanity to come collecting on a medical bill for a deceased spouse, particularly years afterward.
Corporate inhumanity is the easiest kind! In fact, that's almost the point!
(used to be, anyway)
Corporations are people, my friend.
Magical, invisible people that can be used to justify all manner of inhumanity...but with none of the accountability! What an awesome arrangement!
Relevant conversations. A couple years ago we had a daugher referred to neurology for the occasional headaches she was getting. One intake appointment with less than 5 minutes with the doctor to take a peek at her eyes. "Seems ok. Continue with the Ibuprophen. That'll be $650 please." Reduced slightly by insurance agreements. We're trying all manner of things to avoid going back, meanwhile, headaches continue.
If I had any faith they would do anything for her, I'd pay the man, but you pay for the privelage of being seen, regardless of outcome, and are hostage to the unnamed pricing.
It's not a fair market because the consumer is uninformed and utterly powerless in the transaction. I always thought I was conservative, generally, but if I want someone to act in the name of public good, I've reached a point where I'm picking the government over "in the name of the shareholder" every time. I am completely cynical about the prospects of this entire industry.
And I generally don't do cynicism well. But this one gets me.
This sort of thing is what set me down a path of cynicism back in the day. I went to the same emergency room three times because I couldn't breathe and the first two times they just did a chest xray and said I just had pneumonia. Third time they finally did the CT scan and found the clots in my lungs. So yeah, I could have died but I was still charge a grand for each trip to the emergency room plus the cost of a 3 day hospital stay and all that entails.
I've had a pain in my right forearm, just in front of the elbow, since October. Every time I think of going to the doctor for it, I think she'll run a bunch of tests and send me to a bunch of appointments and I'll end up with a lot of burnt time and money and no less pain in the arm.
That's exactly my problem with the justification of high deductible + HSA plans (or at least how they've been justified to me). The companies (whether the insurance provider or employer providing the insurance) always say something about how it is a great plan because you get more power to choose how to use your plan.
Sitting in the hospital with my son, watching him struggle with breathing, there's no way I would have said no to anything the doctors suggested. Am I supposed to ask how much each oxygen bottle exchange cost? Say no to a specialist coming in to provide an opinion, or haggle on the price?
Uh huh.
The same problem is why it's recommended that if you want a funeral for yourself to actually purchase it ahead of time. Having loved ones make financial decisions when they're under significant grief often leads to overspending.
Indeed. Healthcare (of many types, at least) has completely inelastic demand. That inefficiency is why a pure market really can't work either.
not completely inelastic. There is plenty of evidence of treatment being deferred/foregone because of cost expectations.
also, not the only reason. See the discussion above about health care as an "experience good" (you pays your money and you gets your service, and only after the fact do you, maybe, learn whether the service solved the problem for which you sought the service in the first place).
(of many types, at least)
What you say is what I was going for with the parenthetical.
I'm sure this is not exactly what you're getting at, but I've spent far too much time as present, healthy, me resolving that future, declining, me won't be choosing marginal increases in my own comfort/longevity over family legacy/security, if I am so fortunate as to be able to provide something to future generations.
This is another manifestation of my cynicsm about this industry and I beg the pardon of those who would give vast sums for time with lost loved-ones.
I don't think so, ZG, but I'm not quite sure how to parse your statement.
inelastic demand --> the quantity demanded does not vary with price. As often applied to healthcare, it is the claim that because "lives are at stake" the quantity of healthcare service demanded doesn't vary with costs.
where costs are hidden to consumers (as in gold-plated insurance coverage, where, say, the marginal cost of treatment is a trivial co-pay), consumer behavior may appear to be price-inelastic. But that's just because they've already paid (via insurance premiums), not because they are insensitive to costs. The costs to the consumer are (largely) constant in this case, unrelated to consumption (in the short run).
But add in co-payments and many, many consumers will be deterred from various services. That is exactly the point of the ACA requiring that preventive services be "free" to the consumer.
Also contributing to inelasticity is the fact that sales and lower prices don't really increase demand. I'm not gonna go get an MRI just because Dollar Tree is selling them now.
True as far as the demand by a particular consumer. But we are talking about aggregate demand. There are plenty of people who would consume far more MRIs if the price to them were much lower.
Sure, but that's still going to lead to a relatively inelastic market. And it's going to vary from service to service. Screenings will be more elastic. Stitches or lung transplants will be less so.
I overstated when I said "completely inelastic," but there are few markets that have less elasticity.
Yes. This is closer to the right framing, I think.
The more market power the producer holds, the more inelastic demand seems to be, all else constant. The more "essential" the good or service, the more inelastic demand seems to be, all else constant.
So, emergency healthcare services tend to have pretty inelastic demand. Delivery room services, pretty inelastic. Etc. But people will defer, delay, or vary consumption of "nonessential" goods and services based on price at much higher rates.
Again, this is part of the motivation for the ACA to have lowered or eliminated marginal costs for various diagnostic services and preventive services -- to get people to seek care earlier rather than delaying until small problems have become deadly or permanent ones.
Not trying to get too Forbidden Zone-y, but this spoke to me, ZG:
I walked a long path toward being a convert to the positions I hold now, and while there are two issues where I'd qualify as conservative (I'm not getting into them here), on things like health care policy & economic regulation I've made a profound shift. I simply can't point to those industries reliably acting in good faith or prioritizing the public good over the profit motive.
I'm possibly more liberal than Bernie, but what I can't figure out is that everyone is going to get sick at some point and everyone will die of something eventually. How the right has convinced people that health care is a privilege and not a right is beyond me. Anything further than this goes straight to the forbidden zone so I'll just stop here.
Framing it as insurance helps with that idea.
I think a big part of it is there is a group of people that are convinced that the private sector does a better job than the public sector without exception.
My usual response to that kind of thinking:
I'm assuming that video is the song from frozen. Or, it's ace of base.
I'm not sure what this has to do with building snowmen.
I thought we got rid of the old way and we could just do the link now?
Yes, but the URL must be on its own line.
I'll remember that eventually.
Remember, it's the cleaner, less messy way of formatting the link.
Sean, if I could high five you right now I would.
That "without exception" is a stickler, isn't it?
Yes.
The military is both a public organization that is the only institution capable of performing its function at scale with any semblance of economic efficiency, and an organization that is fundamentally socialist in its approach to health care, housing, subsistence, education, and so on. It's also the public institution that people who think the private sector does it best will most frequently point to as an unimpeachable example of American values.
Some might call that an exception to the rule; I call it cognitive dissonance.
Unfortunately, their operational performance of many of these duties are truly awful by civilian standards.
If you say so.
Yeah... I spent a lot of time on health law and policy. Basically, we're all sorts of screwed up, so I'll just echo what everyone else has said and keep sadly shaking my head.
Ugh, the past few years have caused me to hate our health insurance system with a fiery passion. The worst year was 2015 when Mr. NaCl changed jobs midway through the year and the new job had a 60-day waiting period where we could get on the new insurance plan. I ran the numbers, and it looked like it would be better to go on MNsure for the two months and then the new plan rather than switching to the plan through my job. Well . . . the HR person effed up and due to when his start date was, it was actually a 90-day wait. Which meant all my calculations were garbage. It was a mess all around, and incredibly expensive, because we started all over with the deductible and out-of-pocket max every time we switched plans.
Pepper, AMR, Zack, et al... Mitski coming back to town, opening for Pixies at Palace Theater.
Deets soon.
That... sounds like a good show.
I'm not really a big Pixies fan anymore as I think they are going through the motions but I could be convinced otherwise.
I could see that.
Random: I was at a restaurant yesterday that played a Ted Nugent song, followed by... late `80s Throwing Muses? Wut? A little bit later they played what I'm relatively sure was Camera Obscura. Strange place.
I never really got into the Pixies* and I'd fear going to one of their shows for the opener would be taking a ticket from someone who could better appreciate them.
*probably timing: I love the Breeders (' first two albums plus the Amps' album) and like Frank Black ('s first two solo albums).
I saw the promotional picture and thought, "Damn, Kim Deal is looking good these days... oh, wait."
Also, Kim Shattuck was in the Pixies for a little bit!? Huh. I once ate polish sausage with her and The Muffs.
That has to be some kind of euphemism that I don't understand.
*waggles eyebrows*
more euphemisms
I think I'm more ready for baseball than usual too - but only for actual games. It seems like forever away until they'll be playing, and for some reason I'm just less excited by roster battles or front office moves, etc., than I have been in recent years. I just want to see Buxton at real game speed.
Not sure if you get into it, but the WBC is starting in a week or so. I eat up as much of it as I can.
Ooh, I had forgotten about that. Yeah, I tend to get into that a bit too. Thanks for the reminder.
I'm finally around to listening to Car Seat Headrest. I'd post this on Friday, but I will have forgotten by then. If you told me this was Franz Ferdinand, I would have believed you. And that is by no means a slight.
Yup.
I'm now also getting strong notes of Belle & Sebastian and The National
Per Buster Olney, umpires Bob Davidson, John Hirschbeck, Jim Joyce, and Tim Welke have retired.
Four in one year?! Good news for the guys desperate to move up.
It seems odd that all four would be announced at the same time. I'm curious whether MLB knew about these retirements for a while, and just waited until now to announce them for some reason, or whether these guys might have been forced out.
Could be also some rules or procedures changes that happened and they retired as a form of protest.
If so it seems like they'd make that known. Of course, that might still be to come.
You can put away the tinfoil hat. Three of them made public announcements in 2016 of their intent to retire at the conclusion of the season or postseason. Joyce is the only new announcement.
So apparently, of my two choices, it's the former. Thanks!
Yup. Not sure why MLB "announced" them today. Even Joyce's retirement news is over a month old.
That list is missing Joe West.
That's "Cowboy" Joe West to you.
We can have some confidence that there's a little bit of self-awareness in that office: Angel Hernandez was passed over as crew chief. Again.
ESPN reports that the traditional intentional walk will be replaced by a dugout signal. I don't think that'll do much to speed up the game, but I'm not particularly opposed to it, either.
did intentional walks count as four pitches?
Not a fan. Wild pitches and balks must happen occasionally. It takes what, 2 minutes, tops, to throw four intentional balls?
The Twins had 24 all last season (AL average was 23, NL had more), so it isn't like this is going to actually save much time.
If cutting the game time is so important to MLB they could cut down on commercials and find a way to compensate the broadcasters for the reduced ad inventory. I have a feeling Manfred is going to have a lot of other initiatives that shave minutes over the course of the season instead.
As much as I loathe commercials, there are so many options to speeding up the pace that skipping the four tosses home is going to do nothing. I wonder if this is a token effort to say they tried and when it fails, something more drastic happens.
Reusse did the math.
Big savings.
NFL will certainly be making the extra point a wave from the coach now too, right?
Somehow, that will increase the length of the games.
Like they care.
I think it would take more than forty seconds to issue an intentional walk. But yeah, it's no big savings. On the other hand, I don't think having the manager point to first rather than seeing four lobbed pitches is going to detract from my enjoyment of baseball, so to me, it's not a big deal either way.
But what about the value of the foregone if rare moments like Cabrera's below?
(So it happened just the once I'm aware of since 2006, probably much further back.)
Sac Fly, 2016:
Also, check out the graph of IBBs by year about halfway down (which should be divided by games played or something).
Or Pat Light from last year.
12 since 1900, so about once a decadeSABR has the list from 2011 and before:
1907 (Ty Cobb)
1908
1937 (Lineout)
1955
1959, May 7 (Willie Mays, fouled out to catcher)
1959, May 29 (Fielded by Sparky Anderson, scoring Hank Aaron)
1972 (Pete Rose)
1973
1980
1996
2006 (Cabrera)
2016 (Sanchez, RBI Sac Fly)
Rod Carew at least once swung through IBB pitches as an attempt to get the opposing team to pitch to him with a more favorable (to them) count.
I understand that we lose those rare moments in which something happens on an intentional walk. If that's enough to make it a big deal to you, fine. To each his own. It's just not enough to make it a big deal to me.
Huh. I always though that heaving the ball was integral to intentionally walking the batter as the pitcher might miss the catcher and the (assumed) runners might advance...
Sad!