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Biotech / Medical : Oxford Health Plan (OXHP) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Andreas who wrote (530)	12/13/1997 1:25:00 PM
From: jeffbas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2068

Re: "doesn't know what its costs are" You make it sound like an easy task to know that. While Oxford has been guilty of many things, you are on weak ground poking fun at them on this one. Every group health business will eventually know what its costs WERE. So what. What actuaries get paid a lot for in this business is making good ESTIMATES of what the costs will be in the future. This involves estimating at what rate future medical costs will rise, whether claim or premium payment lag patterns experienced in the past will continue in the future given a constantly changing mix of business, etc. Premium rate guarantees for typically a year require estimates of the future to be made, and the price for missing a moving target you cannot now see can be very high. I would also add that you can stick all the honest, disinterested, highly paid actuaries in a room you want and they will still have differing opinions on the same data. Doubling their salaries would make no difference. One of Oxford's main mistakes as I have posted elsewhere is that because of administrative/system failures they lost control of the data. Therefore, they were not even able to make competent ESTIMATES of what was and would be going on.

To: Andreas who wrote (530)	12/13/1997 7:27:00 PM
From: Gene J. Abel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2068

Wow, your so angry. With so much anger you need to settle down cause it's not healthy. Besides your looking at 5-7 years before any potential outcome, if this goes to court. By then the stock price could be back to the level before OXHP's troubles. This weeks Fortune magazine has a pretty positive article on OXHP and its potential future. I feel Fortune a neutral party has given us insight to what happened. Basically we had ignorant, cocky management that misjudged how to manage their growth. The author indicates that's about it, no blantant fraud here at all. Once again I believe your best chances for getting back what you've lost on paper is start promoting the positive side of OXHP. My experiences with lawsuits says your chances to collect anything in class action suits is minimal, to many claimants and to much goes to lawyers.