President Trump

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Bob001 said:
CNN is reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies advised Obama and Trump that MI-5 says the Russians claim to have "compromising" information about Trump.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intelligence-report-russia/index.html
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As we heard this breaking news from CNN, it reminded me of how Watergate began. Karen agreed.

Included in that report to Obama and Trumps was evidence that Trump staffers had been in contact with Russians during the campaign.

Added to the Watergate feel was one of the reporters - I forget whether it was Woodward or Bernstein - was involved in putting together the story. Though in the segment I heard no reference to Watergate was made.
 
WilliamSeger said:
As it turns out, this "loophole" affected about 2% of Americans because the greedy insurance companies figured out that it was to their advantage to let those plans go and force people to buy more expensive plans.
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Time for some Insurance 101, instead of blithe assumptions of malice ;)

There are two major dynamics that went into most of the grandfathered plans being closed. One is relatively straightforward, and I'll address that first. The second is more complicated, so it will be longer. There are a plethora of other contributing factors as well, but these two make up the bulk of the decisions here.

First Reason: It costs money and time to continue offering a plan. The plans have to be rated and filed, their financial performance has to be evaluated, they require separate reserves as a close pool, and in a very large number of cases, they require maintenance of a separate and distinct provider network. All of those are costs. If the pool of people who want to keep their plan is too small, it's simply not financially feasible to continue offering it. In some cases, there are enough people who want to keep that plan that it works out, which is why some insurers are still maintaining their direct-to-consumer grandfathered plans.

Second Reason: It was a closed pool, and it will inevitably spiral. This is where it's going to get a bit more complicated. The first thing to cover is how premiums are developed in the first place. Premiums are 99.99% [Expected cost of care] + [administrative costs] + [margin]. Now, you can decry the evils of profit all you want, but I expect you to direct that lens to all the other elements of the medical industry as well, before you single out the middlemen (insurance companies) as the evildoers because of their horrific 2% to 4% average margins. Although it varies from state to state, there are generally restrictions on pricing that require at least 80% of the premium to be expected costs. That means that around 15% to 18% of the premium costs covers all of operation costs including premium taxes (2%), commissions (average about 7%), facilities, salaries, etc.

For simplicity, let's say that 80% of the premium is expected cost of care. This is where the "closed pool" bit comes in. With the passing of ACA, insurers were no longer allowed to *sell* those policies to new people. People who *already had them* could keep them, but no new sales were allowed to occur. That was over 9 years ago. That means that everyone who had a pre-ACA grandfathered plan and still has one is now 9 years older than they were before. Age has a pretty high correlation with medical cost - older people cost more. Not surprising, really, given the volume of medical conditions that are age-onset: diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc. The average claim cost trend by age is approximately 2% (although this varies considerably depending on the degree of underwriting that was available to insurers in each state, as well as many other socio-economic factors).

So over 9 years, that means that the expected cost of care in 2010 dollars would have increased by (1.02)^9 = 1.21. Premiums would be on the order of 21% higher based on nothing except the change in age of the people in the pool.

But age isn't the only factor. Doctors, just like everyone else, want annual raises for inflation. New drugs enter the market, new treatments are developed, etc. The underlying observed cost trend over the past 9 years has averaged about 5% per year. It varies regionally, but this is a reasonable estimate for our purposes.

This means that each year, the cost goes up by about 5% for the underlying observed trend... AND the cost goes up by about 2% for aging. That's a 7% cost increase per year. That works out to (1.07)^9 = 1.84. So premiums would increase by around 84% over those 9 years.

But wait - it gets better! You also have to account for the impact of selection. In the individual market, each insurer is competing against the others... and their grandfathered pool is also competing against their ACA pool. If left open, each year, some subset of grandfathered people will decide that they would do better with an ACA plan, or without insurance, or with a short-term policy, or they move, or any other number of things. But it's NOT a representative sample. For a large variety of reasons, the people who leave a plan tend to be the healthier ones; the less healthy people are much "stickier". That means that in any given year with a closed pool, the expected cost of coverage increases by more than the trend and aging combined. It increases because the healthier people tend to leave and the sicker people (read those with higher expected claim costs) stick around.

The premium trend on a closed pool tends to increase at a pretty significant rate... close to 10%, although as previously stated there are a LOT of other factors that go in to the actual experienced trend rate.

At some point, the premiums on that closed pool just become too high to continue to sustain in any reasonable fashion, the fixed administrative costs can't be spread among a really small pool effectively, and it just becomes a losing proposition for everyone concerned.

That ends today's Insurance 101 Lecture. Thank you for your time, and I hope you've learned something useful ;)
 
Fast Eddie B said:
As we heard this breaking news from CNN, it reminded me of how Watergate began. Karen agreed.

Included in that report to Obama and Trumps was evidence that Trump staffers had been in contact with Russians during the campaign.

Added to the Watergate feel was one of the reporters - I forget whether it was Woodward or Bernstein - was involved in putting together the story. Though in the segment I heard no reference to Watergate was made.
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Oddly enough, 'Watergate' works as a term for this one too...
 
Spindrift said:
It's going to have to be something amazingly bad to be useful like being with Hillary and Rosie O'Donnell as they eat a newborn baby. Otherwise, Trump's supporters seem willing to ignore anything and everything.
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Whatever it is, I would think it best for him to just go ahead and reveal it rather than let it be used as leverage against him. He's the most impervious-to-scandal politician I've ever seen and I think he could weather almost anything they've got.
 
The New York Times is reporting:
The chiefs of America’s intelligence agencies last week presented President Obama and President-elect Donald J. Trump with a summary of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had collected compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump, two officials with knowledge of the briefing said.

The summary is based on memos generated by political operatives seeking to derail Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Details of the reports began circulating in the fall and were widely known among journalists and politicians in Washington. Link
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The highlighted I found very interesting. But I wonder if they have more than what The Times alluded to:
The memos describe sex videos involving prostitutes with Mr. Trump in a 2013 visit to a Moscow hotel. The videos were supposedly prepared as “kompromat,” or compromising material, with the possible goal of blackmailing Mr. Trump in the future.

The memos also suggest that Russian officials proposed various lucrative deals, essentially as disguised bribes in order to win influence over the real estate magnate.
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Tomorrow's press conference is going to be interesting if he goes through with it.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk
 
Fast Eddie B said:
....
Added to the Watergate feel was one of the reporters - I forget whether it was Woodward or Bernstein - was involved in putting together the story. Though in the segment I heard no reference to Watergate was made.
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It was Carl Bernstein, who has been working for CNN during the campaign. I suspect he knows how to find reliable sources.
 
alfaniner said:
"I cannot hold a press conference tonight because I have to attend to correcting the lies that the dishonest and deplorable media is spreading."
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I suspect Kellyann will be there instead, saying something "It never happened, and besides, if it did it doesn't matter, Mr. Trump has a great heart, the Democrats are just sore losers, and what about the emails?" Etc.
 
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