How House Bill Runs Over Grandma
- good thing we have journalists to be idiots. Then we don’t have to do it ourselves. Three hurrahs for the Fourth Estate. Now more stupid than the three others.
Well… He does speak with an American accent. 
Funny. Judging from his accent I thought he was from Robonia, a land I didn’t make up.
I had no idea he was British.
It is one thing to not know if he is British, it is another to write an article implying he “wouldn’t stand a chance” if he was British without checking first!
What’s so funny about this isn’t so much that they thought he was American. What’s funny is their use of a lifelong citizen and resident of of Great Britain as an example of someone who wouldn’t have survived in Great Britain. It sort of puts a dent in their argument.
Oh, and makes them look incredibly stupid.
Well, Hawking is a member of Al Gore’s Vice Presidential Action Rangers, so I’m not surprised the reporter thought he was American.
One might also ask how Stephen Hawking would have done if he had been American. He developed Lou Gehrig’s disease after getting his BA, and while working on his doctorate at Cambridge. Do doctoral students at prestigious American universities have health insurance that would have covered treatment of his disease?
They’ve finally changed it - it looks like they just yanked that paragraph. And in the correction they say that it “implied” that Hawking didn’t live in the UK. 
Also the part where the average lifespan after being diagnosed with ALS is maybe ten years or so. And Dr. Hawking was diagnosed forty some years ago.
So, yeah. I think ‘stupid’ is a teeny bit mild in this case. Seriously - the man is probably the most well-known living scientist in the world, how the hell do you make a mistake like that?
You make that mistake by being an ill-informed idiot who can’t fact check, I guess.
Probably yes. Almost all major American universities require students to have health insurance that covers just about anything.
I’ve checked up on this, though: for the usual grad student health insurance, you’d be looking at the following from here:
There’s a few more things, but that’s the gist of it. At the highest deductible, this would come at a cost of $770.00/year. At the lowest, $3,170.00. Also, preexisting conditions are not covered for the first 12 months.
I wouldn’t take this insurance if I had the choice, not with my medical conditions. I have kidney stones that, over the last three years, have averaged out on the low side to 1.5 surgeries/year (if these two most recent stones don’t pass, the average will go to 2). I also take metformin for my diabetes. Yeah, these are pretty high health bills, but nothing compared to someone with ALS.
So, let’s see what I would have paid were I a grad student for the last three years. I’d had kidney stones before, though I had never needed surgery for them. I’ll err on the side of niceness on the insurance company (not usually to be relied upon) and suppose they would have covered the first year’s worth of surgeries. On the EXTREMELY conservative side, this surgery costs $12,000 every time. In my experience, the cost is a bit closer to $15,000 or as high as $17,000. But hey, maybe you got a deal. Maybe you have a really nice surgeon. Since they stop charging you the 80% after the first $10,000, the point is pleasantly moot.
If I have the lowest deductible – probably the cheapest way to go about this, all things considered – I will have paid $9510 in premiums and $750 in deductibles as well as $2000 per surgery. For six surgeries, that’s $22,260 not including followups, office visits, or prescription medication. Also, I’d better never get another one, since the insurance company won’t pay for them anymore.
If the student is lucky, he has a good fellowship (and we can probably assume Stephen Hawking would have had fellowships, grants, scholarships, all that) that will pay at least some of the premiums, but affording school would be hard at that point.
Me neither.
Just out of curiosity, did you know he is at Cambridge?
I thought it was widely know that he holds the same seat Isaac Newton once did (the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics) but maybe I was mistaken.
But, but… Cambridge is in Massachusetts! All those ivory tower types end up in one Cambridge or another, it’s not so easy to keep them straight.
Also something of which I was unaware.
Nope. I didn’t check for neurological disorders, but the insurance that graduate students at my US graduate school had to take the year after I left (I did receive the brochure) included only one kind of obgyn treatment:
voluntary abortions.
So, it didn’t quite cover “about anything,” no.
Someone over at IBD has noted the error. The sentence **Rune **bolded is now gone. The editorial is preceeded by this note:
I’d like to repeat that last clause — “did not live in the UK.” Does using the past tense imply that Dr. Hawking is no longer living?
I used to read IBD when I was trying to make millions in the stock market. Their investing information was quite good and well researched. Their editorials have always been this laughable.
The editor, of course, failed to note that the example of Hawking flies in the face of the point they were using him to try to make.
I thought Data had that chair. 