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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: XBrit who wrote (179528)	10/3/2004 5:40:52 PM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

XBrit, IEEE insurance no longer guarantees coverage to its members: ieeeinsurance.com From their website, it states: "(your) coverage could be denied. You should NEVER discontinue existing insurance coverage until you have (been accepted)" ieeeinsurance.com Just last week, our corporate insurance broker (who gives us the dirt on the insurance industry) told us that she's got several unemployed clients who are high-tech contractors but need insurance and were unable to get it individually because of their pre-existing conditions. So she is advising them to take jobs at Starbucks or Nordstroms because they offer guaranteed health insurance. No kidding. Interestingly enough, State of CA passed a law that made it illegal to decline babies of insured parent. You'll be happy to learn the insurance underwriters have cleverly figured out a loophole to this particular CA law, so that they do not need to grant coverage to babies. Here's the loophole: if a hightech contractor takes (or is even told to take) the vitamin folic acid which is a common vitamin women take a year prior to pregnancy and during, the insurance companies will decline their coverage for 5 years, which means they have legally figured out a way to decline coverage for babies. (Insurance companies are only legally obligated to grant insurance to babies if the parent is covered, so what they do is they decline parents for 5 years.) Interestingly enough, CDC tells all women of childbearing years to take folic vitamin, meanwhile if women were to follow this advice they would be declined coverage for 5 years. Is it good for our country or possibly the GDP, when a hightech worker has to stop working as a hightech contractor in order to get insurance in retail with say a $15,000/yr job? Based upon all the horror stories out there, my company has decided that group plans are not ethically benefiting the employee, because the employee may unknowingly get trapped into a situation where they could get no coverage later on in life, which I don't feel is an ethical thing to do to a person. So we are in the process of shifting healthy people to indivdiual plans at their option (where we will pay for an equivalent premium amount), while maintaining group coverage for anyone who wants it or for anyone who cannot get individual coverage. This way, at least those of us who are healthy and thus able to shift into individual plans may have our coverage for life (or, at least until the dirty trick called "pooling" makes the premiums too expensive.) It's obscene for our industry to grant people health insurance when they are young and then essentially take it away when they get laid off and shift into contracting. I don't want to feel the guilt of doing something bad like that to people. It doesn't cost more to us, so why not give employees a better path to permanent health insurance that's from the capital market. What boggles the mind is how both Parties have messed this all up. Neither parties are listening to their constituents. On one hand, the Republican Politicians do not pass a law that makes it illegal to decline people that always responsibly pay their premiums. (Republicans believe in responsibility, so why don't the Republican politicians listen to the Republican people on this matter. Go figure.) If you're always paying into the system, you should never be declined from the system. Meanwhile the Democrats (my Party affiliation) want to create a bad govt health care plan (yuck, who would want to be on it?), rather than simply creating a law making it illegal to decline people (period, no clever loopholes either) who have been paying into the system forever. Govt medical insurance stinks - look no further than Canada's long lines (my brother had said he gets Canadian patients, for example) or how long Mike Magee had to wait for a Cardiologist to see him under the UK's govt health plan. Govt health care have waiting lines that are so long, it's amazing people don't die before they see a Cardiologist. Maybe, that's how they control their costs - they let people die waiting! So, rather than providing a middle of the road solution, both parties want to continue making it legal to not give people insurance and then they want taxpayers to pay for those people's health care even when those people would prefer to pay their own premiums in the capital system. Both parties are hell bent on increasing this deficit, and simply are not listening to their people. So it's high time for corporations to let employees dump their corporate group plans and get individual plans instead. That will wake up Congress, since nothing else has. This is what we're doing at my company. Quite likely others will follow suit - it's easy to influence the VC sheep. I remember when we started offshoring back when VCs thought we were nuts to do it so we educated some on it, and now only after four years VCs think you're nuts if you don't. Regards, Amy J