Saw this on youtube and as sickening as it is in concept i found it very amusing.
Not surprising given my experiences in trying to get health insurance in the land of the free.
I may be poor, but I’m apparently lucky in that I qualify for Medicaid.
I wonder how popular a not quite pubic option would be: just cover people who can’t get covered by other insurance companies.
The disgusting thing about it is that an infant who is breastfed on demand without supplementation, which this baby appears to be, cannot be “overweight” by any qualitative standard, barring some illness, which this baby doesn’t have. He’s height-weight proportionate, 99th percentile in both. He’s just a big baby. And babies need all that fat, to protect them when they fall down, and keep them warm (takes a while for self-regulation to kick in) and to help their little brains grow. Saying that higher weights correlate to health issues so there “has to be” a cutoff at the 95th percentile is a legitimate thing for people who eat food, but not for a pre-solids breastfed infant.
And as many breastfeeding mothers know, there are separate weight and growth charts for breastfed babies, because the CDC chart, which the insurer is using, is based on averages including formula fed babies, who gain weight slowly over time, compared to breastfed babies who gain lots of weight quickly then level out. Is skews the statistics significantly to try to merge the two disparate groups into one standard. They’re not measuring this baby on the proper standard. (And the World Health Organization’s standard puts him in an even lower percentile, around the 85th or so, because it not only standardizes for breastfeeding but removes the statistical anomalies and outliers created by malnourishment.)
It wouldn’t work, it would be a financial nightmare. You need a preponderance of healthy people on your plan, paying in premiums, so that when people get sick, there’s a big pool of money there to pay for their care. This is part of why Medicare is a mess, because there aren’t enough people on the plan who aren’t really using it.
I swear, it’s like the insurance company *wants *to be put out of business. I know that if I were an insurance exec, right now I’d be doing everything I could to appear to be on the public’s side.
Evidently achange of heart has occurred. All it took was a little news coverage to make 'em see the error of their ways.
Though none of the other companies which admit to having the same policy have, er, weighed in yet.
I thought this was a joke. Evidently not.
What about all the babies born with birth defects? I’m surprised the insurers don’t try to drop them, too. They’re a hell of a lot more expensive than a chubby newborn. Or a baby born prematurely that racks up a few weeks / months in a NICH.
Hell, some insurers probably do.
Yes, back when I was working in the Evil Insurance Empire a decade ago there was a big to-do about some companies denying coverage for cleft palate surgery for infants due to it being a “pre-existing” condition. Probably for other things, too, but the cleft palate stuck in my mind.
…this is almost comically evil. I imagine a CEO who looks just like Dick Cheney signing the “Fuck Cleft Palate Babies” memo in kitten blood.
I think what pissed me off the most about that (and quite a few of the actually medically knowledgeable people in the company/industry) is the notion some of the decision makers had that cleft palate was a cosmetic issue. Well, yes, there is a cosmetic element involved, but if you know anything about cleft palate you quickly find out that in all but the most minor of cases there are real underlying structural problems with the mouth, in some cases life-threatening defects. No understanding at all - while there certainly doctors employed by the insurance industry, the executives are not required to have any medical training or knowledge whatsoever. There are medically trained health insurance CEO’s and high level executives, but they are, from what I’ve seen, the minority.
Thanks for posting exactly what I was thinking! I have seen so many chubby and even ultra-chubby babies as a breastfeeding counselor, and they tend to just stretch out as they grow up. By the time they’re preschoolers, they are just as thin as any other kid.
There’s a joke in there, somewhere. I just can’t think of it yet …
When I was seven months old I needed diagnosed with strabismus. My eyes were crossed. Many babies have crossed eyes, apparently, but by the six month mark mine showed no sign of aligning. It’s a minor condition and a simple way to fix it is a minor surgical procedure, which the specialist in pediatric ophthalmology recommended - maybe we can fix it completely now and she’ll have normal vision.
The insurance company threw a fit, said that by then it was a pre-existing condition (well…I guess, technically?). Apparently they threatened to drop me from the policy, raised my parent’s premiums up to a ghastly amount, etc. My parents hoped it would work out and went ahead with the surgery regardless. Afterwards, the insurance company refused to pay. My parents - who could absolutely in no way afford to pay the full cost of the surgery - had to get a lawyer, and apparently the paperwork finally wrapped up after we’d left that insurance company (Dad changed jobs), and shortly before I needed the same surgical procedure again.
But to say something nice (I guess) about the insurance industry, the insurer we’d switched to covered the second procedure without the slightest comment. They then paid, in full, with no copay, for two full ophtalmological exams for me each year, because they were classified as ‘post-surgical care’. They continued to accept it as post-surgical care for nearly ten years, at which point we got a rather abrupt letter informing us that we’d now have something like a $75 copay for each visit.
Studies seem to show otherwise - fat babies often (40%) become obese preschoolers.
That article mentions that the researches looked at weight:height correlations and then proceeds to completely disregards such correlations. Not much of a source, if you ask me.
Those studies don’t seem to be drawing any distinction between breastfed babies and formula fed babies. It makes a difference.
Amen.
Then google it and read one of the dozen other articles about the study.
The thing is that breastfed infants are often smaller than formula fed. Even so, if the baby is exclusively breast fed, I would say it is just a big baby. Doesn’t mean it is unhealthy at all.
Forget about the kid being fat. Forget about breastfeeding. Forget about adults having problems with insurance companies due to pre-existing conditions.
We have a country where a baby - a BABY- is basically told, “No you can’t have coverage. Fuck off and die.”
I can see how to put it any other way. This is what we’ve apparently chosen. USA! USA! USA!