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The issue of reimbursement by payers is an important factor that should be discussed. Is it possible that if radiologists use AI to read scans, they’ll receive less reimbursement? Or to approach this from the other angle, if payers are reimbursing for the use of AI, will they pay radiologists less as a result? My discussions with insurance executives have shown that they don’t think this is likely. If the use of these technologies will improve patient outcomes and lead to fewer errors, there are benefits to them that will motivate executives to pay for them in addition to radiologists’ reading fees.
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Ronald M. Razmi (AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors)
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A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
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Roger Zelazny (Creatures of Light and Darkness)
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Muhammad said that gratitude for the abundance you’ve received is the best insurance that the abundance will continue. Buddha said that you have no cause for anything but gratitude and joy. Lao Tzu said that if you rejoice in the way things are, the whole world will belong to you. Krishna said that whatever he is offered he accepts with joy. King David spoke of giving thanks to the whole world, for everything between the heavens and the Earth. And Jesus said thank you before he performed each miracle.
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Rhonda Byrne (The Magic (The Secret, #3))
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He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. And
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David McCullough (Truman)
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Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
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Roger Zelazny (Creatures of Light and Darkness)
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But whoever seriously considers the immense extent of territory comprehended within the limits of the United States, together with the variety of its climates, productions, and commerce, the difference of extent, and number of inhabitants in all; the dissimilitude of interest, morals, and politics, in almost every one, will receive it as an intuitive truth, that a consolidated republican form of government therein, can never form a perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to you and your posterity, for to these objects it must be directed. This unkindred legislature therefore, composed of interests opposite and dissimilar in their nature, will in its exercise, emphatically be like a house divided against itself.
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George Clinton
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Gratitude for the abundance you have received is the best insurance that the abundance will continue.” Muhammad (570-632)
FOUNDER OF ISLAM
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Rhonda Byrne (The Power (The Secret, #2))
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To vanquish the ‘five giants’ of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease, Beveridge’s plan was for everyone to contribute to a social insurance fund and in return receive the same entitlement to benefits such as healthcare or unemployment insurance.
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Minouche Shafik (What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society)
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Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable. In 2008 19,045 children age five and under were prescribed antipsychotics through Medicaid.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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All France, it has often been said, is a garden, and if you love France, as I do, it can be a very beautiful garden. For myself I found it healing and soothing to the spirit; I recovered from the shocks and bruises which I had received in my own country. But there comes a day, when you are well again and strong, when this atmosphere ceases to be nourishing. You long to break out and test your powers. Then the French spirit seems inadequate. You long to make friends, to create enemies, to look beyond walls and cultivated patches of earth. You want to cease thinking in terms of life insurance, sick benefits, old age pensions and so on.
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Henry Miller (The Colossus of Maroussi)
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A statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company predicted the imminent extinction of Black people in his epic book that relied on the 1890 census figures. Unlike the Plessy ruling, Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro received plenty of attention in 1896. Packed with statistical tables and published by the American Economic Association, the book was a pioneering work in American medical research, and it catapulted Hoffman into scientific celebrity in the Western world as the heralded father of American public health. At “the time of emancipation,” he wrote, southern Blacks were “healthy in body and cheerful in mind.” “What are the conditions thirty years after?” Well, “in the plain language of the facts,” free Blacks were headed toward “gradual extinction,” pulled down by their natural immoralities, law-breaking, and diseases. Hoffman supplied his employer with an excuse for its discriminatory policies concerning African Americans—that is, for denying them life insurance. White life insurance companies refused to insure a supposedly dying race. Yet another racist idea was produced to defend a racist policy.3
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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I wonder what would happen if I tried the same reasoning on you.
'I have received your insurance premium invoice. My conclusion is this fee is not financially appropriate for you. It is my decision that you should be paid in bags of rocks deposited directly on your testicles. You may appeal this decision by screaming and hitting your head against a brick wall until you get tired, then read this letter again because I'm not fucking listening.
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Jenny Lawson (Broken (In the Best Possible Way))
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Exposing error is most unpopular work. But from every true standpoint, it is worthwhile work. To our Saviour, it means that He receives from us, His blood-bought ones, the loyalty that is His due. To ourselves, if we consider "the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt," it insures future reward, a thousandfold. And to souls "caught in the snare of the fowler"- how many of them God only knows- it may mean light and life, abundant and everlasting.
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H.A. Ironside (Holiness The False and The True)
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But noisy systems do not make multiple judgments of the same case. They make noisy judgments of different cases. If one insurance policy is overpriced and another is underpriced, pricing may on average look right, but the insurance company has made two costly errors. If two felons who both should be sentenced to five years in prison receive sentences of three years and seven years, justice has not, on average, been done. In noisy systems, errors do not cancel out. They add up.
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Daniel Kahneman (Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment)
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No one chooses to become a banker. It just happens, like cancer, and then you try to live with it for as long as you can. After thirteen years in the industry, I was damn near terminal. With each step up the corporate ladder I received a slightly smaller laptop, a slightly-harder-to-adjust office chair. To compensate they offered free donuts and coffee cards. Weekends off. 401K vesting. Medical insurance that I had to have because they were turning me into a half-blind hunchback with diabetes. The
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Jeremy Robert Johnson (Skullcrack City)
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Here’s the bottom line: The most recent data compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education show that the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receives roughly $25,733 in government benefits a year, while the average household in the top 20 percent receives about $35,363.[36] Every year, the richest American families receive almost 40 percent more in government subsidies than the poorest American families.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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Several years ago I was lecturing in British Columbia. Dr [Simon] Wessely was speaking and he gave a thoroughly enjoyable lecture on M.E. and CFS. He had the hundreds of staff physicians laughing themselves silly over the invented griefs of the M.E. and CFS patients who according to Dr Wessely had no physical illness what so ever but a lot of misguided imagination. I was appalled at his sheer effectiveness, the amazing control he had over the minds of the staid physicians….His message was very clear and very simple. If I can paraphrase him: “M.E. and CFS are non-existent illnesses with no pathology what-so-ever. There is no reason why they all cannot return to work tomorrow.
The next morning I left by car with my crew and arrived in Kelowna British Columbia that afternoon. We were staying at a patient’s house who had severe M.E. with dysautanomia and was for all purposes bed ridden or house bound most of the day. That morning she had received a phone call from her insurance company in Toronto. (Toronto is approximately 2742 miles from Vancouver). The insurance call was as follows and again I paraphrase:
“Physicians at a University of British Columbia University have demonstrated that there is no pathological or physiological basis for M.E. or CFS. Your disability benefits have been stopped as of this month. You will have to pay back the funds we have sent you previously. We will contact you shortly with the exact amount you owe us”.
That night I spoke to several patients or their spouses came up to me and told me they had received the same message. They were in understandable fear.
What is important about this story is that at that meeting it was only Dr Wessely who was speaking out against M.E. and CFS and how … were the insurance companies in Toronto and elsewhere able to obtain this information and get back to the patients within a 24 hour period if Simon Wessely was not working for the insurance industry… I understand that it was also the insurance industry who paid for Dr Wessely’s trip to Vancouver.
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Byron Hyde
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Another person posted this to the group Hashimoto’s 411: I can’t do this any more, I am beside myself and can’t stop crying. Today, I received a disability denial letter from Social Security stating that my condition is not severe enough to qualify. . . . I don’t know what to do, I feel like I am no longer living but just existing and miserable because I feel so sick. My unemployment extended benefits are going to run out and then we’ll be in big trouble if we can’t pay our bills, which include lots of medical bills because I don’t have insurance. I just don’t want to be here any more, and think my husband would be better off not having to deal with me, and with my life insurance he would be much better off financially.
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Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
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There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars’ worth of bonds. He’d either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he’d insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn’t own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to “insure” it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn’t insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market—and this was the second way to think about it.
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Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
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employment attorney review your severance letter of agreement before you sign it. “Even if you decide not to negotiate your financial package, you may want to negotiate other things, like health insurance and references for your next job,” she explains. Go in with the expectation that you won’t get everything you ask for, but you will get more than what they originally offered. Weinberg recommends an often-used formula to calculate severance: number of years at the company multiplied by two weeks’ pay = severance total. Request back pay for unused vacation days, plus a portion of the bonus you were expected to receive at the end of the year. Request a written letter of recommendation and assurance that it will be upheld if a prospective employer calls for references, and ask for a written agreement that any noncompete clause in your original offer is at this point null and void.
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Ivanka Trump (Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success)
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In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent).
Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and noplace in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am on the Nadir, maître d’s, Chief Stewards, Hotel Managers’ minions, Cruise Director—their P.S.’s all come on like switches at my approach. But also back on land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile—the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement—the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile? Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile? And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker’s scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.
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David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: An Essay)
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them. By far the best theory for describing the principles of our irrational decisions is something called Prospect Theory. Created in 1979 by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, prospect theory describes how people choose between options that involve risk, like in a negotiation. The theory argues that people are drawn to sure things over probabilities, even when the probability is a better choice. That’s called the Certainty Effect. And people will take greater risks to avoid losses than to achieve gains. That’s called Loss Aversion. That’s why people who statistically have no need for insurance buy it. Or consider this: a person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of receiving $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of getting $9,499 will usually avoid risk and take the 100 percent certain safe choice, while the same person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of losing $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of losing $9,499 will make the opposite choice, risking the bigger 95 percent option to avoid the loss. The chance for loss incites more risk than the possibility of an equal gain.
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Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It)
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Templates for Protest Letters 1. TO TACKLE A SURPRISE OUT-OF-NETWORK BILL Dear Sir or Madam: The bills enclosed were for out-of-network services performed on __________ during my admission to __________ Medical Center, a hospital that is in my insurance network. I went to __________ Medical Center precisely because it was in my network. I was not informed of these providers’ out-of-network status and did not consent to being treated by any out-of-network providers. Since I did not give informed consent for treatment beyond the terms and network of my insurance policy, I suggest you contact my insurer to work out payment; I will pay only that portion of the bill that I would have paid for in-network services. Please stop this effort to collect a bill I do not owe for a service I was never informed would be out-of-network. If I get another notice, I will report this collection effort to the __________ State Department of Insurance and __________ State Department of Consumer Affairs. Sincerely, 2. TO OBTAIN MEDICAL RECORDS AND ITEMIZED BILLS Dear Sirs or Madam: I have now requested my medical records/itemized bill __________ times and have yet to receive the material. It is my right to receive these
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Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
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At such a time [at dawn] I would dream of being a baker who delivers bread, a fitter from the electric company, or an insurance man collecting the weekly installments. Or at least a chimney sweep. In the morning, at dawn, I would enter some half-opened gateway, still lighted by the watchman's lantern. I would put two fingers to my hat, crack a joke, and enter the labyrinth to leave late in the evening, at the other end of the city. I would spend all day going from apartment to apartment, conducting one never-ending conversation from one end of the city to the other, divided into parts among the householders; I would ask something in one apartment and receive a reply in another, make a joke in one place and collect the fruits of laughter in the third or fourth. Among the banging of doors I would squeeze through narrow passages, through bedrooms full of furniture, I would upset chamberpots, walk into squeaking perambulators in which babies cry, pick up rattles dropped by infants. I would stop for longer than necessary in kitchens and hallways, where servant girls were tidying up. The girls, busy, would stretch their young legs, tauten their high insteps, play with their cheap shining shoes, or clack around in loose slippers.
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Bruno Schulz (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass)
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To purchase a Volkswagen, customers were required to make a weekly deposit of at least 5 Reichsmarks into a DAF account on which they received no interest. Once the account balance had reached 750 Reichsmarks, the customer was entitled to delivery of a VW. The DAF meanwhile achieved an interest saving of 130 Reichsmarks per car. In addition, purchasers of the VW were required to take out a two-year insurance contract priced at 200 Reichsmarks. The VW savings contract was non-transferable, except in case of death, and withdrawal from the contract normally meant the forfeit of the entire sum deposited. Remarkably, 270,000 people signed up to these contracts by the end of 1939 and by the end of the war the number of VW-savers had risen to 340,000. In total, the DAF netted 275 million Reichsmarks in deposits. But not a single Volkswagen was ever delivered to a civilian customer in the Third Reich. After 1939, the entire output was reserved for official uses of various kinds. Most of Porsche’s half-finished factory was turned over to military production. The 275 million Reichsmarks deposited by the VW savers were lost in the post-war inflation. After a long legal battle, VW’s first customers received partial compensation only in the 1960s.
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Adam Tooze (The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy)
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The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.
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Ben Lerner (The Topeka School)
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In March 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit society of scholars, released a high-profile report documenting the unequivocal existence of racial bias in medical care, which many thought would mark a real turning point. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care was so brutal and damning that it would seem impossible to turn away. The report, authored by a committee of mostly white medical educators, nurses, behavioral scientists, economists, health lawyers, sociologists, and policy experts, took an exhaustive plunge into more than 480 previous studies. Because of the knee-jerk tendency to assume that health disparities were the end result of differences in class, not race, they were careful to compare subjects with similar income and insurance coverage. The report found rampant, widespread racial bias, including that people of color were less likely to be given appropriate heart medications or to undergo bypass surgery or receive kidney dialysis or transplants. Several studies revealed significant racial differences in who receives appropriate cancer diagnostic tests and treatments, and people of color were also less likely to receive the most sophisticated treatments for HIV/AIDS. These inequities, the report concluded, contribute to higher death rates overall for Black people and other people of color and lower survival rates compared with whites suffering from comparable illnesses of similar severity.
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Linda Villarosa (Under the Skin)
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My Future Self
My future self and I become closer and closer as time goes by. I must admit that I neglected and ignored her until she punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the hair and turned my butt around to introduce herself.
Well, at least that’s what it felt like every time I left the convalescent hospital after doing skills training for a certification I needed to help me start my residential care business. I was going to be providing specialized, 24/7 residential care and supervising direct care staff for non-verbal, non-ambulatory adult men in diapers! I ran to the Red Cross and took the certified nurse assistant class so I would at least know something about the job I would soon be hiring people to do and to make sure my clients received the best care.
The training facility was a Medicaid hospital. I would drive home in tears after seeing what happens when people are not able to afford long-term medical care and the government has to provide that care. But it was seeing all the “young” patients that brought me to tears.
And I had thought that only the elderly lived like this in convalescent hospitals….
I am fortunate to have good health but this experience showed me that there is the unexpected.
So I drove home each day in tears, promising God out loud, over and over again, that I would take care of my health and take care of my finances. That is how I met my future self. She was like, don’t let this be us girlfriend and stop crying!
But, according to studies, we humans have a hard time empathizing with our future selves. Could you even imagine your 30 or 40 year old self when you were in elementary or even high school? It’s like picturing a stranger.
This difficulty explains why some people tend to favor short-term or immediate gratification over long-term planning and savings.
Take time to picture the life you want to live in 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years, and create an emotional connection to your future self. Visualize the things you enjoy doing now, and think of retirement saving and planning as a way to continue doing those things and even more.
However, research shows that people who interacted with their future selves were more willing to improve savings. Just hit me over the head, why don’t you!
I do understand that some people can’t even pay attention or aren’t even interested in putting money away for their financial future because they have so much going on and so little to work with that they feel like they can’t even listen to or have a conversation about money.
But there are things you’re doing that are not helping your financial position and could be trouble. You could be moving in the wrong direction.
The goal is to get out of debt, increase your collateral capacity, use your own money in the most efficient manner and make financial decisions that will move you forward instead of backwards.
Also make sure you are getting answers specific to your financial situation instead of blindly guessing! Contact us. We will be happy to help!
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Annette Wise
“
La Societe D'elite
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La Societe D'elite
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Give us an idea of…” Noya Baram rubs her temples. “Oh, well.” Augie begins to stroll around again. “The examples are limitless. Small examples: elevators stop working. Grocery-store scanners. Train and bus passes. Televisions. Phones. Radios. Traffic lights. Credit-card scanners. Home alarm systems. Laptop computers will lose all their software, all files, everything erased. Your computer will be nothing but a keyboard and a blank screen. “Electricity would be severely compromised. Which means refrigerators. In some cases, heat. Water—well, we have already seen the effect on water-purification plants. Clean water in America will quickly become a scarcity. “That means health problems on a massive scale. Who will care for the sick? Hospitals? Will they have the necessary resources to treat you? Surgical operations these days are highly computerized. And they will not have access to any of your prior medical records online. “For that matter, will they treat you at all? Do you have health insurance? Says who? A card in your pocket? They won’t be able to look you up and confirm it. Nor will they be able to seek reimbursement from the insurer. And even if they could get in contact with the insurance company, the insurance company won’t know whether you’re its customer. Does it have handwritten lists of its policyholders? No. It’s all on computers. Computers that have been erased. Will the hospitals work for free? “No websites, of course. No e-commerce. Conveyor belts. Sophisticated machinery inside manufacturing plants. Payroll records. “Planes will be grounded. Even trains may not operate in most places. Cars, at least any built since, oh, 2010 or so, will be affected. “Legal records. Welfare records. Law enforcement databases. The ability of local police to identify criminals, to coordinate with other states and the federal government through databases—no more. “Bank records. You think you have ten thousand dollars in your savings account? Fifty thousand dollars in a retirement account? You think you have a pension that allows you to receive a fixed payment every month?” He shakes his head. “Not if computer files and their backups are erased. Do banks have a large wad of cash, wrapped in a rubber band with your name on it, sitting in a vault somewhere? Of course not. It’s all data.” “Mother of God,” says Chancellor Richter, wiping his face with a handkerchief.
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Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
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By now, though, it had been a steep learning curve, he was fairly well versed on the basics of how clearing worked: When a customer bought shares in a stock on Robinhood — say, GameStop — at a specific price, the order was first sent to Robinhood's in-house clearing brokerage, who in turn bundled the trade to a market maker for execution. The trade was then brought to a clearinghouse, who oversaw the trade all the way to the settlement.
During this time period, the trade itself needed to be 'insured' against anything that might go wrong, such as some sort of systemic collapse or a default by either party — although in reality, in regulated markets, this seemed extremely unlikely. While the customer's money was temporarily put aside, essentially in an untouchable safe, for the two days it took for the clearing agency to verify that both parties were able to provide what they had agreed upon — the brokerage house, Robinhood — had to insure the deal with a deposit; money of its own, separate from the money that the customer had provided, that could be used to guarantee the value of the trade. In financial parlance, this 'collateral' was known as VAR — or value at risk.
For a single trade of a simple asset, it would have been relatively easy to know how much the brokerage would need to deposit to insure the situation; the risk of something going wrong would be small, and the total value would be simple to calculate. If GME was trading at $400 a share and a customer wanted ten shares, there was $4000 at risk, plus or minus some nominal amount due to minute vagaries in market fluctuations during the two-day period before settlement. In such a simple situation, Robinhood might be asked to put up $4000 and change — in addition to the $4000 of the customer's buy order, which remained locked in the safe.
The deposit requirement calculation grew more complicated as layers were added onto the trading situation. A single trade had low inherent risk; multiplied to millions of trades, the risk profile began to change. The more volatile the stock — in price and/or volume — the riskier a buy or sell became.
Of course, the NSCC did not make these calculations by hand; they used sophisticated algorithms to digest the numerous inputs coming in from the trade — type of equity, volume, current volatility, where it fit into a brokerage's portfolio as a whole — and spit out a 'recommendation' of what sort of deposit would protect the trade. And this process was entirely automated; the brokerage house would continually run its trading activity through the federal clearing system and would receive its updated deposit requirements as often as every fifteen minutes while the market was open. Premarket during a trading week, that number would come in at 5:11 a.m. East Coast time, usually right as Jim, in Orlando, was finishing his morning coffee. Robinhood would then have until 10:00 a.m. to satisfy the deposit requirement for the upcoming day of trading — or risk being in default, which could lead to an immediate shutdown of all operations.
Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being 'spent' on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house's trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades.
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Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
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Today 60% of workers in the private sector receive their insurance through their employer. I believe that by 2025 fewer than 20% of workers at private companies will continue to receive their health insurance through an employer-sponsored program. Nevertheless many will still receive an employer contribution, a so-called defined contribution toward the purchase of health insurance in the exchange. I believe the majority of private-sector workers will get their coverage through the exchanges.
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Ezekiel J. Emanuel (Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System)
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As friends or family members and caregivers, we can help a great deal by listening and empathizing with women who are in the thick of it. We can bring them small gifts...and make sure they are invited to get-togethers even if it is unlikely they will make it. When women are homebound caretakers, a daily phone call can be a lifesaver. We can acknowledge both the efforts other women are making and validate the importance of those efforts.
...She cannot help feeling used and bitter. Ardith told me, "I received awards for my art, but nothing for Mom Duty."
"I'm buying you a trophy and a dozen roses." I said.
Ardith laughed and said, "Just buy me the roses. Yellow please."
I brought the roses but, at the same time, I know that Ardith's and all other caregiver' primary validation must be internal. When we do something arduous such as deal with an insurance company all day, we must give ourselves credit for our skill and persistence. At the end of a difficult afternoon, we need to remind ourselves that we perform honorable labor and that there will be better days.
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Mary Pipher (Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age)
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First, A ship of the finest make and model available shall be furnished to carry the constructors home.
2nd, The said ship shall be laden with various cargo as here specified: diamonds—four bushels, gold coin—forty bushels, platinum, palladium, and whatever other ready valuables they happen to think of—eight bushels of each, also whatever mementos and tokens from the Royal Apartments the signatories of this instrument may deem appropriate.
3rd, Until such time as the said ship shall be in readiness for takeoff, every nut and bolt in place, fully loaded and delivered up to the constructors complete with red carpet, an eighty-piece send-off band and children's chorus, an abundance of honors, decorations and awards, and a wildly cheering crowd—until then, no King.
4th, That a formal expression of undying gratitude shall be stamped upon a gold medallion and addressed to Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors Trurl and Klapaucius, Delight and Terror of the Universe, and moreover it shall contain a full account of their victory and be duly signed and notarized by every high and low official in the land, then set in the richly embellished barrel of the King's favorite cannon, which Lord Protozor, Master of the Royal Hunt, shall himself and wholly unaided carry on board—no other Protozor but the one who lured Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors to this planet thinking to work their painful and ignominious death thereby.
5th, That the aforesaid Protozor shall accompany them on their return journey as insurance against any sort of double-dealing, pursuit, and the like. On board he shall occupy a cage three by three by four feet and shall receive a a daily allowance of humble pie with a filling made of that very same sawdust which Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors saw fit to order in the process of indulging the King's foolishness and which was subsequently taken to police headquarters by unmarked balloon.
6th and lastly, The King need not crave forgiveness of Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors on bended knee, since he is much too beneath them to deserve notice.
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Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
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Birds— and Territory My dad and I designed a house for a wren family when I was ten years old. It looked like a Conestoga wagon, and had a front entrance about the size of a quarter. This made it a good house for wrens, who are tiny, and not so good for other, larger birds, who couldn’t get in. My elderly neighbour had a birdhouse, too, which we built for her at the same time, from an old rubber boot. It had an opening large enough for a bird the size of a robin. She was looking forward to the day it was occupied. A wren soon discovered our birdhouse, and made himself at home there. We could hear his lengthy, trilling song, repeated over and over, during the early spring. Once he’d built his nest in the covered wagon, however, our new avian tenant started carrying small sticks to our neighbour’s nearby boot. He packed it so full that no other bird, large or small, could possibly get in. Our neighbour was not pleased by this pre- emptive strike, but there was nothing to be done about it. “If we take it down,” said my dad, “clean it up, and put it back in the tree, the wren will just pack it full of sticks again.” Wrens are small, and they’re cute, but they’re merciless. I had broken my leg skiing the previous winter— first time down the hill— and had received some money from a school insurance policy designed to reward unfortunate, clumsy children. I purchased a cassette recorder (a high- tech novelty at the time) with the proceeds. My dad suggested that I sit on the back lawn, record the wren’s song, play it back, and watch what happened. So,
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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records in any form I request under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act within thirty days and for a reasonable handling and processing fee. If this material is not quickly forthcoming, I will file a complaint with the federal Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, which prosecutes HIPPA violations. Sincerely, 3. TO CHALLENGE OUTRAGEOUS CHARGES/BILLING ERRORS Dear Sirs or Madam: I’m writing to protest what I regard as excessive charges for my operation/hospitalization/procedure at your medical facility. The operation/hospitalization/procedure was billed to my insurer/me at $__________,__________. This total included several itemized charges that were well above norms for our nation and our region, such as a $__________,__________ charge for __________ and a $__________,__________ charge for __________. The Healthcare Bluebook says a “fair price” is $__________,__________ and $__________,__________. Likewise, my bill includes entries for treatments I simply did not receive, such as $__________ for __________ and $__________ for __________. Before sending in any payment, I’m requesting that your billing and coding department review my chart to revise the charges, or explain to me the size and the nature of such entries. I have been a loyal customer of your hospital for many years and have been happy with my excellent medical care. But if these billing issues are not resolved, I feel compelled to report them to the state attorney general/consumer protection agency, to investigate fraudulent or abusive billing practices. Sincerely,
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Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
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A counterargument is that nonfunctional autistics who could benefit from a treatment and a cure but elect not to pursue either of them, are a financial burden on society, and on the healthcare system. Since things such as social services are paid for through taxes exacted on everyone, and since insurance premiums for all may be based on the spread out costs of treatments that are necessary for a select few, “normal” tax-paying people who may or may not have insurance policies ultimately pay a large percentage of the bill for the care of non-functional autistics even though they receive little or no benefit from this outflow of cash. At
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Thomas D. Taylor (Autism's Politics and Political Factions: A Commentary)
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Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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For many victims of motor vehicle collisions, the decision whether to pursue an insurance claim or handle their own case can be a difficult one. However, there are numerous reasons why victims of accidents should be represented by a lawyer if they have received a substantial injury such as whiplash.
A Car Accident Lawyer Will Explain The Process to You
When they hire a car accident lawyer, victims of accidents will immediately receive the assistance and attention they need and deserve. Because most of the details of how car accidents occur are unique and not common knowledge, knowing how to proceed will be the major difference in the outcome of the case.
A lawyer who is familiar with how insurance companies operate will know how to negotiate a better settlement with them. During an accident, most insurance companies will want to pay the least amount possible and move on, not even addressing the extent of the damage to the other car or some of the details of the accident. When victims have a lawyer involved, they will not be vulnerable to these tactics.
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The Echavarria Law Firm
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Nowhere is our reactive instead of proactive model or care more apparent than in the stupefying fact that you currently need to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder to receive insurance reimbursement for mental health counseling. That's like needing to have the flu before you're allowed to wash your hands.
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Katherine Morgan Schafler (The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power)
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Prepaid expenses are expenditures that have already been made for benefits that the company will receive in the near future. Examples of prepaid expenses are advances for insurance policies, rent, and taxes. Prepaid expenses are classified as current assets, not because they can be turned into cash, but because if they had not been prepaid, that cash would have to be spent within 12 months. Some prepaid expenses also result in cost savings, such as paying insurance premiums annually instead of monthly.
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Mariusz Skonieczny (The Basics of Understanding Financial Statements: Learn how to read financial statements by understanding the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement)
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State-run broadcast TV had been around for decades, but poor reception and a dearth of programming meant there simply wasn’t much reason to watch. But lately, thanks to a steep fall in the price of equipment and distribution, great swaths of India have been wired for cable and satellite TV. Between 2001 and 2006, some 150 million Indians received cable for the first time, their villages suddenly crackling with the latest game shows and soap operas, newscasts and police procedurals, beamed from the big cities of India and abroad. TV gave many Indian villagers their first good look at the outside world.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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Consider the amount of money left on the table by low-income workers who don’t apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Roughly 7 million people who could receive the credit don’t claim it, collectively passing up $17.3 billion annually. Combine that with the amount of money unclaimed each year by people who deny themselves food stamps ($13.4 billion), government health insurance ($62.2 billion), unemployment insurance when between jobs ($9.9 billion), and Supplemental Security Income ($38.9 billion), and you are already up to nearly $142 billion in unused aid.[19]
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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Only a quarter of families who qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families apply for it. Less than half (48 percent) of elderly Americans who qualify for food stamps sign up to receive them. One in five parents eligible for government health insurance (in the form of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program) do not enroll, just as one in five workers who qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit do not claim it.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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Most schools fulfill this legal obligation by providing services that won’t involve a perpetrator, such as academic accommodations or healing resources. At Western University, victim advocates would broker agreements between survivors and their professors to get extensions on assignments or excused absences. They would also help survivors submit paperwork to receive refunds for classes they dropped or failed due to the strains of their traumatic symptoms. To improve survivors’ mental health, the Counseling Center hosted group therapy for sexual assault survivors and offered one-on-one counseling at a cheaper rate than the insurance co-pay at most private practices. Advocates also had a small fund available to cover survivors’ trauma-related expenses. Overwhelmingly, survivors who received these resources benefited from them. Some called them life-changing. However, few survivors felt comfortable actually using them. Especially more than once.
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Nicole Bedera (On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence)
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But the company had some additional items besides the net cash. Buffett noted the outstanding tickets. All sold—but unused—tickets were a liability; they were a form of deferred revenue. The company had received the cash, but the tickets were not yet redeemed. The value of this liability remained unchanged from 1952 to 1953, suggesting the tickets were very unlikely to be utilized. Plus, since the marginal cost of an additional passenger was zero, no cash expenditure would be incurred even if a passenger used the ticket. Therefore, it was appropriate to treat the cash as ‘earned’ and to write the liability down to zero, adding another $1.61 of value. Then there were the long-term assets. While the property and equipment might be worth less than their value on the company’s books, special deposits and insurance trusts had real value that would likely be released over time. These two items would add another $53.72 of value. With the stock trading below net cash, these assets were all gravy.
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Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
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They said goodbye which took another five minutes because kind people here, not used to phones, not trustful of them either, didn't want to be rude or abrasive by hanging up after just one goodbye in case the other's leave-taking was still travelling its way, with a delay, over the airwaves towards them. Therefore, owing to phone etiquette, there was lots of "Bye", "Bye", "Goodbye, son-in-law", "Goodbye, mother-in-law", "Goodbye", "Goodbye", "Bye", "Bye", with each person's ear still at the earpiece as they bent their body over, inching the receiver ever and ever closer on each goodbye to the rest of the phone. Eventually it would end up back on its hook with the human ear physically removed from it. There might be further insurance goodbyes even at this stage, out of compulsion to seal and make sure the matter, which didn't mean the person who'd gone through the protractions wasn't contorted in body and exhausted in mind by the effort of detaching from a phone conversation. What it did mean was that that conversation - without any anxious "Did I cut him off? Will he be hurt? Have I hung up too soon and damaged his feelings?" - had finally reached its traditional end.
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Anna Burns (Milkman)
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Families are finding that they are getting funding from a variety of sources. One typical family has counseling covered through their insurance for family counseling, and counseling funded by a federally funded adoption support program for their child. They receive respite care funded through the Division of Developmental Disabilities. They pay privately for Sibshop, a well-loved program for the siblings of their special needs children. Since the Sibshop is through a non-profit organization, it is particularly affordable. Their school district pays for tutoring. After they specifically requested a review, they received an adoption subsidy available to older children through their state. The cost of braces was partially reimbursed by the adoption support system, as well. The combination of resources and financial relief allowed the parents to enjoy some outings, plan a simple family vacation, and get some household help. They said, “Without this help, we would not have made it as an emotionally intact family. We would not have disrupted, but we would not have been the unit that we are today.
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Deborah D. Gray (Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents)
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The unprecedented bull market in Treasury bonds, supported by the belief that Treasury bonds are “insurance policies” in the case of financial collapse, could end as badly as the bull market in technology stocks did at the turn of the century. When economic growth increases, Treasury bondholders will receive the double blow of rising interest rates and loss of safe-haven status. One of the prime lessons learned from long-term analysis is that no asset class can stay permanently detached from fundamentals. Stocks had their comeuppance when the technology bubble burst and the financial system crashed. It is quite likely that bondholders will suffer a similar fate as the liquidity created by the world’s central banks turns into stronger economic growth and higher inflation.
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
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The tobacco settlement money went to lawyers and to governments, which effectively turned the money into a tax and then spent it on state bureaucracy. Regular folk did not receive any tax refund checks, nor did we see lower health insurance premiums, but we did pay more for everyday products not related to smoking. This means we are, in effect, paying billions of dollars in additional tax besides the billions in legal fees because of the tobacco settlement, as well as funding the next legal campaign to collect another large pay-day in contingency fees. It is very interesting to note during the tobacco suit that, while claiming various individuals were being victimized, or medical costs were mounting from misleading advertising or dishonest business practices, it was lawyers and governments, not the people nor their insurance companies, that collected all the loot. This the type of litigation did nothing to improve your life and it raised your cost of living.
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Howard Nemerov (Four Hundred Years of Gun Control: Why Isn't It Working?)
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(The term “sheep-dipped” appears in The New York Times version of the Pentagon Papers without clarification. It is an intricate Army-devised process by which a man who is in the service as a full career soldier or officer agrees to go through all the legal and official motions of resigning from the service. Then, rather than actually being released, his records are pulled from the Army personnel files and transferred to a special Army intelligence file. Substitute but nonetheless real-appearing records are then processed, and the man “leaves” the service. He is encouraged to write to friends and give a cover reason why he got out. He goes to his bank and charge card services and changes his status to civilian, and does the hundreds of other official and personal things that any man would do if he really had gotten out of the service. Meanwhile, his real Army records are kept in secrecy, but not forgotten. If his contemporaries get promoted, he gets promoted. All of the things that can be done for his hidden records to keep him even with his peers are done. Some very real problems arise in the event he gets killed or captured as a prisoner. There are problems with insurance and with benefits his wife would receive had he remained in the service. At this point, sheep-dipping gets really complicated, and each case is handled quite separately.)
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L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World)
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The rise of the Rockefeller family was made possible from two angles by the Rothschilds. One was by the large subsidies placed on transports of Rockefeller oil. The documents of the American trade register prove that the Rothschilds, since 1896, have owned ninety-six percent of the American railways. This made it possible to transport oil on rail. When John D. Rockefeller wanted to expand, he received the financial support he needed to do so from the Rothschilds through their National City Bank of Cleveland. In exchange, the Rockefellers had to transport their oil via the Rothschilds railways. An illegal agreement saw to it that the Rockefellers received a bonus for the amount of oil they transported by train. Because of this agreement nobody could compete with the Rothschilds in transporting Rockefeller oil. This was all arranged by Jacob Schiff, of the company Kuhn & Loeb, the brain behind the foundation of the Rockefeller imperium. Under the authority of the Rothchilds, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. continue to manage the Rockefeller capital, which is valued at over 400 billion dollars. In 1950 the New York Times reported L.L. Strauss, a partner with Kuhn, Loeb & Co., as the financial adviser to the Rockefeller estate. Because of this, every investment had to be approved and signed by a partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. According to the periodical Fortune in 1985, the wealth of the Rockefellers was spread amongst more than 200 companies. These companies include six of the largest industrial companies in America, six of the largest banks, five of the largest insurance companies and three of the largest companies from different branches (electricity, water, infrastructure, fruits, oil, gold, and others). Not including the remaining 180 other companies, the total assets of these twenty giants amount to 460 billion dollars.
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Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
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Nathanael hadn’t delivered any specific message; the angel’s parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes. Sixty-two people received medical treatment for injuries ranging from slight concussions to ruptured eardrums to burns requiring skin grafts. Total property damage was estimated at $8.1 million, all of it excluded by private insurance companies due to the cause. Scores of people became devout worshipers in the wake of the visitation, either out of gratitude or terror. Alas,
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Ted Chiang (Arrival)
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We should remember why those programs were started: before the arrival of Medicare and Social Security, the private sector left most elderly bereft of support, the market for annuities essentially didn’t exist, and the elderly couldn’t get health insurance. Even today, the private sector doesn’t provide the kind of security that Social Security provides—including protection against market volatility and inflation. And the transactions costs of the Social Security Administration are markedly lower than those in the private sector. In addition, many of the people who receive government benefits without paying for them are our young, obviously unable to pay, say, for their own education. But spending on them is an investment in the country’s future. An
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Joseph E. Stiglitz (The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future)
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HMOs have been so successful that they now occupy a dominant position in the market for health care in the United States. Approximately forty-five million Americans are uninsured. Of the remainder, about half are enrolled in some type of HMO. Most others receive some sort of managed care plan. Less than 10 per cent of Americans still have classic fee-for-service private health insurance (down from more than 70 per cent in the late ’80s). So even though many people equate HMOs with private health care, these sorts of corporations exist only because of the failure of private markets to supply appropriate health care. HMOs succeed precisely because they are more efficient than insurance markets. There should be no illusions about the character of these organizations—they are giant bureaucracies. The largest of them, Kaiser Permanente, employs over eleven thousand physicians and has more than six million subscribers in the state of California alone. This makes Kaiser larger than most of the government-run health care systems in Canada. And while the Canadian system is extremely decentralized, Kaiser Permanente is a single, vertically integrated corporation.
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Joseph Heath (The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets)
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If your property damage in New Jersey, Interstate Public Adjusters can help you receive the full value for your insurance reimbursement. A public adjuster in NJ works for you, not the insurance company. This means that they safeguard your interest in receiving the full value of the insurance policy you paid for.
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Interstate Public Adjusters
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I was very demanding, but the role of a head coach is that of a demanding teacher. Those of you who are reading this book can probably all look back on a tough teacher you had, and if you’re lucky you think of him or her with affection. Demands must be coupled with true caring for the students. A demanding teacher is quick to praise action that deserves praise, but will criticize the act, not the person. The coach’s job is to be part servant in helping the player reach his goals. Certainly, coaching was not a matter of manipulating people to do what would help us. I never did like the term handle people, which to me meant conning people. The life insurance salesman who genuinely believes someone needs life insurance is different from the one who tries to manipulate or con them into buying something they do not need. I believed a demanding teacher should treat each player as an important part of the team, which, of course, he is. The least skilled player received the same attention from me as the best player. When their careers drew to a close, I always had what I called an “exit meeting” with each young man, to discuss what his goals had been and what they were for the future. To me, the players got the wins, and I got the losses. Caring for one another and building relationships should be the most important goal, no matter what vocation you are in.
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Dean Smith (A Coach's Life: My 40 Years in College Basketball)
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In most cases—but not all!—a spousal benefit is equal to half of the Primary Insurance Amount—the retirement benefit the other spouse would receive upon reaching their FRA.
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Laurence J. Kotlikoff (Get What's Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security (The Get What's Yours Series))
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Helping the poor isn’t always pleasant It’s no picnic helping the poor. There’s often no feeling of fulfillment. It’s work – like a lot of virtue is work. The poor, as fate would have it, are just like us. They’re mixtures of virtues and vices. Like us, they aren’t always grateful. Like us, they don’t always trust. Like us, they don’t always respond. Like us, they’re both generous and greedy. Like us, they’re sometimes wonderful and sometimes awful. Whatever happened to the noble poor? Some are out there, but mostly they are in Charles Dickens’ novels. The “poor” poor aren’t always so noble, and they are the hardest to deal with – which is probably why we don’t. Mental note: When you help the poor, you always receive more than you give – but it may not seem that way at the time. Another thing I learned is that food baskets at Thanksgiving, toys at Christmas are good as far as they go – but they don’t go very far. People easily talk about direct help to the poor on special occasions – clothes, food, money. Those fine things shouldn’t be taken lightly. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is trying to do something about the poor’s state in life. The discussion always slowed when we tried to focus on this. Where do you begin? What do you do? It’s hard when you deal with the causes. How can we give them basic skills to manage their lives? Can we make loans available to them through our own credit unions at considerable risk? Shouldn’t the state make better provision for dependent children? What about health insurance? How do we help them find work? How do we help them find work that pays a living wage? Why are single parents, usually women, abandoned so easily by a spouse? Mental note: Direct assistance is good. Tackling the causes is better.
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Ken Untener (The Little Black Book for 2015: Six-Minute Meditations on the Passion According to Luke)
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Of more angst to drivers are the customer ratings systems imposed by the app companies. While most drivers do not have a problem with the notion of being rated, they are concerned that they will receive poor marks for circumstances beyond their control. Customers can give even the most earnest drivers bad ratings for any reason such as bumpy rides over pothole strewn roads, traffic congestion and passengers underestimating how much time they need to reach their destinations. Miscommunication between passengers and drivers can occur because passengers cannot speak the local language, are drunk, or fall asleep and cannot direct the driver to their remote destinations. Perhaps some passengers just do not like the ethnic group to which some drivers appear to belong. Circumstances such as these are clearly the fault of passengers who may rate drivers poorly nonetheless.
Drivers with low ratings can be expelled from on-demand taxi services. This unfairness is compounded to the extent that drivers make large investments in their cars, insurance and fuel. Making drivers, who basically invested in a franchise, vulnerable to expulsion from a system because of unfair ratings seems to me to be a potential source of dissention or even litigation.
Another concern associated with the taxi app business model is that drivers only have 15 seconds to respond to notices of pick up opportunities. Drivers that fail to respond in such tight windows lose the business. Repeat failures to make timely responses can result in temporary suspensions. This pressure, and related distractions associated with interacting with handsets, is applied simultaneously with all of the challenges of navigating traffic in a variety of weather conditions. Foremost, this is a driving hazard that imperils everyone in the vicinity. It also ties in with the ratings systems because drivers are only rated on the rides they complete. Drivers who claim rides but abandon the customer if it looks like the pickup will be delayed have no ratings risk. Paradoxically, no ratings result in the worst customer service as passengers end up stranded.
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David Wanetick (Business Model Validation)
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A medical student is sent for training at a clinic specializing in sexual disorders. The head of the clinic takes the student on a tour. In the first room they enter, there’s a patient masturbating. “What’s his diagnosis?” the student asks. “He has a severe case of Semen Buildup Disorder. If he doesn’t ejaculate multiple times a day, he becomes disoriented and nauseated.” In the second room they find a patient with his pants down around his ankles, receiving oral sex from a beautiful nurse. “What about his diagnosis?” the student asks. “Same condition. He just has better health insurance.
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Scott McNeely (Ultimate Book of Jokes: The Essential Collection of More Than 1,500 Jokes)
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Social money and payments: iZettle, Payatrader, mPowa, SumUp, payleven, Inuit GoPayment, Square • Social lending and saving: Zopa, RateSetter, smava, Prosper, Lending Club, Cashare • Social insurance: Friendsurance • Social investing and trading: StockTwits, eToro, Myfxbook, Fxstat, MetaTrader Trade Signals, Collective2, Tradeo, ZuluTrade, Nutmeg • Social trade financing: MarketInvoice, Platform Black, the Receivables Exchange, Urica • Payday Lending: Wonga, Cash America, Advance America • Goal setting and gamification: SmartyPig, Moven, Simple • Crowdfunding: Funding Circle, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, crowdrise, Razoo
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Chris Skinner (Digital Bank: Strategies to launch or become a digital bank)
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To understand what that means in commonsense terms, consider a person who plans to live off the income from $1 million invested in T-bills. Suppose he retires in a given year and converts his investments into an inflation-protected annuity with a return of 4% to 5%. He will receive an annual income of $40,000 to $50,000. But now suppose he retires a few years later, when the return on the annuity has dropped to 0.5%. His annual income will now be only $5,000. Yes, the $1 million principal amount was fully insured and protected, but you can see that he cannot possibly live on the amount he will now receive. T-bills preserve principal at all times, but the income received on them can vary enormously as return on the annuity goes up or down. Had the retiree bought instead a long-maturity U.S. Treasury bond with his $1 million, his spendable income would be secure for the life of the bond, even though the price of that bond would fluctuate substantially from day to day. The same holds true for annuities: Although their market value varies from day to day, the income from an annuity is secure throughout the retiree’s life.
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Anonymous
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If I were not a fool, I could spend the happiest and most delightful life here. So many agreeable circumstances, and of a kind to insure a worthy man's happiness, are seldom united. Alas! I feel it too sensibly,--the heart alone makes our happiness! To be admitted into this most charming family, to be loved by the father as a son, by the children as a father, and by Charlotte!--then the noble Albert, who never disturbs my happiness by any appearance of ill-humour, receiving me with the heartiest affection, and loving me, next to Charlotte, better than all the world! Wilhelm, you would be delighted to hear us in our rambles, and conversations about Charlotte. Nothing in the world can be more absurd than our connection, and yet the thought of it often moves me to tears. He
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William Allan Neilson (The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction - German German Fiction Selected by Charles W. Eliot, LL.D.)
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In order for a person to work at a church legally as an independent contractor, we believe it is prudent to consider the following guidelines: · The church cannot substantially direct the person’s duties; the church can only give them overall tasks to complete. · The church cannot control or set their hours that they work. · Since their “company” provides the service, they can send anyone to do the job. · They cannot have an office at the church that is their primary office. · It cannot be their only source of income. · The church needs to have a written contract in place including cost, delivery of Services, duration (i.e. six months, one year, etc.) and a termination clause. · They cannot participate in any employee benefits plans (insurance, retirement plans, etc). · The contractor must provide annual proof of worker’s comp and liability insurance naming the church as additionally insured or the church could be held liable in the event of a claim. · The church must issue a 1099 at the end of the year for all contract wages paid if the total amount for the year exceeds $600.00 to one contractor. We strongly recommend that no payments are made until an accurate and fully completed W-9 is completed by the contractor and on file at the church. Given these requirements, many workers such as those in the nursery, kitchens, and other service areas are not 1099 contractors, but employees. Regarding interim pastors, there is disagreement over whether they should receive a W-2 or 1099. Factors such as length of service, who supervises them, and whether they are a contractor, come into play in the decision on how to report their salary. For the best practice we recommend always using the W-2 to report salaries, but seeking tax and legal counsel would be wise to avoid any future IRS issues. While there are advantages to the church to pay independent contractors who regularly work for the church such as avoiding the need to pay the employer's part of the FICA tax and the ease of terminating their services, we would recommend against their regular use. We recommend against the use of independent contractors (that regularly work at the church) because we believe it can create the following problems for the church: · Less control over the position · Leaves the church open to an IRS challenge, which the church only has a 50/50 chance of defending, not to mention the cost and hassle of litigation · In the event of insurance claims, the church may encounter issues with worker’s compensation coverage or liability insurance coverage such as sexual misconduct, etc. · The church is open to contract disputes with the independent contractor · Based on how the individual/company is filing their taxes, it could bring an unwanted tax audit to the church Our conclusion is that we do not see enough cost-saving advantages for the church to move in this direction. It also creates unnecessary red flags for the IRS. The other looming question is, why is this such an important issue for such a small incremental (if any) tax break for the individual? Because the independent contractor will have to pay employer FICA, we don’t see any large tax advantage for this shift. They can claim mileage and some home office expense (maybe), but it just does not amount to enough to place the church at risk. Here are some detailed guidelines
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Jeffrey A. Klick (Pastoral Helmsmanship)
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Ever since Obamacare was signed into law in 2010 it has distorted American health care, raised insurance costs, and hurt the economy. It has also been implemented with shameless disregard for the law (having been unilaterally changed by President Obama without the permission of Congress at least twenty-eight times) and with almost no transparency. We at Judicial Watch started The National Obama Accountability Project to hold Barack Obama and his administration accountable to the American people for its compulsive secrecy and violations of the law. Since then, we have initiated more than 950 open record requests and filed more than 90 lawsuits to protect the people’s right to know about what the Obama administration is up to. Two areas we have focused on are the complete failure of the Obama administration to protect the privacy of your health records and its connivance with Congress to evade the consequences of the Obamacare law and allow its members and staff to receive subsidies under the law that aren’t available to millions of taxpayers. In
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Tom Fitton (Clean House: Exposing Our Government's Secrets and Lies)
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The bishop had no desire to alienate the count and and accept his requirements. It was a time of great spiritual Independence in france, and of hypocrisy. Many were anti-religious, but followed the forms: They had their children baptized, and married in the Church, and were desperate to receive the last rites from a priest. It was spiritual insurance they sought- the comfort of tradition without restraints on their behavior. It was the sort of transaction the bishop understood perfectly and exploited for his treasury. If the count wanted to keep a pagan woman but remain in the Church and give it money, then the bishop would certainly not deny him his wish. But he must try for the woman's conversion. It was the proper form.
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David Ball (Empires of Sand by David Ball (2001-03-06))
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Though mechanisms to protect against government corruption are needed, these countries should not have to spend their health care and education budgets on costly disaster insurance plans purchased from transnational corporations, as is happening right now. Their people should be receiving direct compensation from the countries (and companies) most responsible for warming the planet.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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Once you have an idea about the type of MA plan you want, it’s time to check out the CMS “star” ratings that measure the quality of MA plans. Plans receive from 1 to 5 stars, with some half stars in between. These ratings are being cleverly used by CMS. First, they give quick and easily understood guidance to consumers. Beyond this, however, they also represent powerful carrots and sticks for insurers.
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Philip Moeller (Get What's Yours for Medicare: Maximize Your Coverage, Minimize Your Costs (The Get What's Yours Series))
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Nowhere is our reactive instead of proactive model of care more apparent than in the stupefying fact that you currently need to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder to receive insurance reimbursement for mental health counseling.
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Katherine Morgan Schafler (The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power)
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The Importance of Bookkeeping Services for Doctors
Managing the financial side of a medical practice can be challenging for doctors, as they are often focused on providing quality patient care. However, maintaining accurate financial records is essential for the success of any healthcare practice. Bookkeeping services tailored specifically for doctors help ensure that their financial transactions are organized, compliant, and manageable, allowing them to focus on what they do best—caring for patients.
Why Doctors Need Specialized Bookkeeping Services
Doctors face unique financial complexities, such as billing for medical services, managing insurance claims, handling payroll for staff, and keeping track of medical supplies and equipment. Additionally, they must ensure compliance with healthcare regulations and tax laws. Professional bookkeeping services designed for doctors take these unique needs into account, helping physicians streamline their financial operations. As a result, they can avoid errors, reduce administrative burdens, and improve cash flow.
Accurate Billing and Cash Flow Management
One of the key challenges doctors face is managing billing and cash flow. With a constant flow of patients and complex insurance claims, maintaining an accurate record of all transactions is essential. Bookkeeping services ensure that billing is handled efficiently, minimizing delays in receiving payments. This service also helps manage insurance claims, reducing errors that could lead to delayed reimbursements. By keeping track of revenue and expenses, bookkeepers ensure that doctors maintain a healthy cash flow.
Tax Compliance and Planning
Doctors often qualify for specific tax deductions related to medical equipment, staff salaries, and office expenses. However, navigating the complexities of healthcare tax regulations can be difficult. Bookkeeping services help doctors stay compliant by keeping their financial records organized and accurate, making it easier to file taxes and take advantage of available deductions. Additionally, bookkeepers can assist in planning for tax obligations throughout the year, ensuring that there are no surprises during tax season.
Financial Reporting for Growth
Bookkeeping services also provide doctors with valuable financial reports that offer insights into their practice’s performance. By analyzing income, expenses, and cash flow trends, doctors can make more informed decisions about expanding services, hiring staff, or investing in new equipment. These reports give a clear picture of the financial health of the practice, enabling better long-term planning.
In conclusion, specialized bookkeeping services for doctors are essential for maintaining accurate financial records, ensuring tax compliance, and improving cash flow. By outsourcing bookkeeping tasks, doctors can focus more on patient care while gaining peace of mind that their financials are in order.
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sddm
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Consider, for example, the landmark 2004 study that followed several hundred patients treated with one of three popular antidepressants: Zoloft, Paxil, or Prozac. Among those who took the drugs as prescribed, only 23% were depression-free after six months of treatment. (As you might expect, patients who failed to take their meds did even worse.) And all three medications yielded roughly the same dismal results. A fluke result, perhaps? It’s actually pretty typical. The recovery rate with antidepressants in similar studies usually falls somewhere between 20% and 35%. Clinical researchers at forty-one treatment sites across the country have just completed the largest real-world study of antidepressants ever conducted, and the results fit the same overall pattern. This multimillion dollar project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Mental Health, followed about three thousand depressed patients who initially took the drug citalopram (marketed under the trade name Celexa) for about twelve weeks. By the end of that short-term treatment period, only 28% of study patients had fully recovered. The study’s 28% response rate might even be an overestimate of the medication’s true effectiveness, because patients received higher drug doses and had more frequent doctor’s visits than people do in everyday clinical practice. (In real life, insurance companies sharply restrict the frequency of “med check” follow-up appointments). Remarkably, the study’s authors—a veritable All-Star team of clinical researchers—noted that the observed 28% recovery rate was about what they had expected to see based on comparable studies. That’s right: They weren’t surprised to find that the majority of study patients failed to recover on an antidepressant. In the study’s published write-up, the researchers also raised a provocative question: What percentage of their patients might have recovered if they had received a sugar pill—a placebo—instead of the medication? Could it possibly have been as high as 28%?
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Stephen S. Ilardi (The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs)
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I was recently reminded of one possible reason that so many therapists are so insistent on arriving at a clinical diagnosis, and, not surprisingly, it’s directly related to problems with the health care system in America. A licensed professional counselor who has worked in the mental health field for many years wrote to say that even though she grew up in a family who strongly believe in the paranormal and in their own psychic gifts, “working with [psychic] kids is definitely a challenge in a pure clinical practice since this is not something you can bill insurance for.” Her point is very valid. Medical and mental health professionals must provide a clinical—and billable—diagnosis in order to receive payment from insurance companies. It is frightening to imagine how many children have been misdiagnosed, mislabeled, and mistreated because of the need to satisfy insurance guidelines!
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Chip Coffey (Growing Up Psychic: My Story of Not Just Surviving but Thriving--and How Others Like Me Can, Too)
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Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can. That recipe will insure you of the thing that matters most at the end of the day and that is that it is more blessed to give than receive but receiving after you have given is the most rewarding feeling of all.
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Chris J. Gregas
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However, not even Soros could persuade Congress to pass any laws, and ultimately these proposals failed. Soros, Gonzales, Leach, and others were up against stiff competition. In the past two election cycles alone, legislators received an estimated $100 million in contributions from banks, investment firms, and insurance companies.
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Frank Partnoy (FIASCO: Blood in the Water on Wall Street)
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Persons not receiving psychotherapy are roughly twice as likely as those who are to visit a physician for no clear-cut medical reason.
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Enrico Gnaulati (Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science are Ruining Good Mental Health Care)
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The forest, I believe, will stay with Bert as he ages. It is a deep terrain, a place of unending variance and subtle meaning. It is a complete sensory environment, whispering with sounds that nourish rather than enervate, with scents that carry information more significant than “nasty” or “nice.” It is different each time you meet it, changing with the seasons, the weather, the life cycles of its inhabitants. It is marked by history and mythologies; stories effortlessly spin from its depths. It is safe from the spite of suburban playgrounds, and dangerous in a way that insurance won’t indemnify. Dig beneath its soil, and you will uncover layers of life: the frail networks of mycelia, the burrows of animals, the roots of trees. Bring questions into this space and you will receive a reply, though not an answer. Deep terrain offers up multiplicity, forked paths, symbolic meaning. It schools you in compromise, in shifting interpretation. It will mute your rationality and make you believe in magic. It removes time from the clock face and reveals the greater truth of its operation, its circularity and its vastness. It will show you rocks of unfathomable age and bursts of life so ephemeral that they are barely there. It will show you the crawl of geological ages, the gradual change of the seasons, and the countless micro-seasons that happen across the year. It will demand your knowledge: the kind of knowledge that’s experiential, the kind of knowledge that comes with study. Know it—name it—and it will reward you only with more layers of detail, more frustrating revelations of your own ignorance. A deep terrain is a life’s work. It will beguile, nourish, and sustain you through decades, only to finally prove that you, too, are ephemeral compared to the rocks and the trees.
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Katherine May (Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age)
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Six critical questions to ask your Guy 1. How are you paid? Fee-only advisers receive no compensation from the sale of investment products. All others do. You can’t count on an adviser who gets a significant portion of their pay in sales commissions. Period. Leave if they are not fee-only. 2. Do you have any conflicts of interest that influence the advice you provide? Financial advisers who are registered representatives get paid to sell insurance or annuity products promoted by their brokers. Ask how they choose the investments they recommend. Ask them directly how they are paid. 3. Will my assets be housed with an independent custodian—that is, a bank that is not selling the investment products? “Yes” is the only acceptable answer here.
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Teresa Ghilarducci (How to Retire with Enough Money: And How to Know What Enough Is)
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With the first banks opened on Monday, the afternoon brought another request from Roosevelt. Stating that he needed the tax revenue, he asked Congress that beer with alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent be made legal; the Eighteenth Amendment did not specify the percentage that constituted an intoxicating beverage. Congress complied. The House passed the bill the very next day with a vote count of 316–97, pushing it to the Senate. Wednesday brought good cheer: The stock market opened for the first time in Roosevelt’s presidency. In a single-day record, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 15 percent—a gain in total market value of $3 billion. By Thursday, for increased fiscal prudence, the Senate had added an exemption for wine to go with beer, but negotiated the alcohol content down to 3.05 percent. Throughout the week, banks were receiving net deposits rather than facing panicked withdrawals. Over the following weeks, the administration developed a sweeping farm package designed to “increase purchasing power of our farmers” and “relieve the pressure of farm mortgages.” To guarantee the safety of bank deposits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created. To regulate the entire American stock and bond markets, the Exchange Act of 1933 required companies to report their financial condition accurately to the buying public, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. Safety nets such as Social Security for retirement and home loan guarantees for individuals would be added to the government’s portfolio of responsibilities within a couple of years. It was the largest peacetime escalation of government in American history.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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The forest, I believe, will stay with Bert as he ages. It is a deep terrain, a place of unending variance and subtle meaning. It is a complete sensory environment, whispering with sounds that nourish rather than enervate, with scents that carry information more significant than 'nasty' or 'nice.' It is different each time you meet it, changing with the seasons, the weather the life cycles of its inhabitants. It is marked by history and mythologies; stories effortlessly spin from its depths. It is safe from the spite of suburban playgrounds, and dangerous in a way that insurance won't indemnify. Dig beneath its soil, and you will uncover layers of life: the frail networks of mycelia, the burrows of animals, the roots of trees.
Bring questions into this space and you will receive a reply, though not an answer. Deep terrain offers up multiplicity, forked paths, symbolic meaning. It schools you in compromise, in shifting interpretation. It will mute your rationality and make you believe in magic. It removes time from the clock face and revelas the greater truth of its operation, its circularity and its vastness. It will show you rocks of unfathmoable age and bursts of life so ephemeral that they are barely there. It will show you the crawl of geological ages, the gradual change of the seasons, and the countless micro-seasons that happen across the year. It will demand your knowledge: the kind of knowledge that comes with study. Know it--name it--and it will reward you only with more layers of detail, more frustrating revelations of your own ignorance. A deep terrain is a life's work. It will beguile, nourish, and sustain you through decades, only to finally prove to you, too, are ephemeral compared to the rocks and the trees.
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Katherine May (Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age)
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Half a million children in the United States currently take antipsychotic drugs. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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Every American should be able to expect certain standards, freedoms, benefits, and opportunities form a twenty-first-century health system. If they are willing to participate and be responsible, they will gain:
•Improved health;
•Longer lives with a much better quality of life;
•A more convenient, understandable and personalized experience -- all at a lower cost;
•Access to the best course of treatment for their particular illness and their unique characteristics;
•A system that fosters and encourages innovation, competition, and better outcomes for patients;
•A system that truly values the impact that medical innovation has on patients and their caregivers as well as on society as a whole;
•A government that facilitates and accelerates extraordinary opportunities to improve health and health care;
•Continuous but unobtrusive 24/7 monitoring of their general health, chronic conditions, and acute health problems;
•Access to the most modern medical knowledge and breakthroughs, including the most advanced technologies, therapies and drugs, unimpeded by government-imposed price controls or rationing;
•The chance to increase their personal knowledge by learning from a transparent system of information about their diagnosis, costs and alternative solutions;
•A continuously improving, competitive, patient-focused medical world in which new therapies, new technologies, and new drugs are introduced as rapidly and safely as possible -- and not a day later;
•Greater price and market competition, innovation and smarter health care spending;
•A system of financing that includes insurance, government, charities, and self-funding that ensures access to health and health care for every American at the lowest possible cost without allowing financing and short-term budgetary considerations to distort and weaken the delivery of care;
•Genuine insurance to facilitate access to dramatically better care, rather than the current system, which is myopically focused on monthly or annual payments;
•A health system in which third parties and government bureaucrats do not impede the best course of treatment that doctors and their patients decide on;
•A health system in which seniors, veterans, or others under government health programs receive the same quality of care as their children in private markt systems.
Big reforms are required to transform today’s expensive, obsolete health bureaucracy into a system that conforms to these principles.
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Newt Gingrich (Understanding Trump)
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Prepaid expenses are expenditures that have already been made for benefits that the company will receive in the near future. Examples of prepaid expenses are advances for insurance policies, rent, and taxes.
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Mariusz Skonieczny (The Basics of Understanding Financial Statements: Learn how to read financial statements by understanding the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement)
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familiar with the “fine print” one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them.
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Ben Lerner (The Topeka School)
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Income volatility can also interfere with the existing social safety net. Some welfare programs require beneficiaries to work a certain number of hours each week, assuming that the number of hours worked is under the control of the employee, rather than the employer.53 Qualification for programs like food stamps and health insurance subsidies is based on an average monthly income threshold. But of course volatile incomes mean that families bounce in and out of eligibility.54 Bouncing in and out of Medicaid ineligibility causes interruptions in care for chronic conditions, particularly in places where the doctors who accept Medicaid and private insurance don’t overlap.55 There can also be severe penalties for “fraud” in these programs, receiving benefits when your income is too high. But households subject to volatile incomes may not, themselves, know when or whether they will cross thresholds of eligibility. For instance, as of 2016, the Pennsylvania Medicaid Application asks whether anyone in the household has a hard time predicting their income, but in the very next question requires applicants to do exactly that—for the next twenty-four months—in order to establish eligibility.
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Jonathan Morduch (The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty)
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What is a good Recommended Daily Sensitive Pores and epidermis Care?
You might not be a sensitive skin type, but at some point, our skin can occasionally get sensitive. It can turn into really irritating when the body and epidermis we possess just serves up simply with period for a significant function inside our actions. But it would certainly not own to arrive to come to be therefore of this. If you take out a daily sensitive pure skin area good care daily action that is normally normally well suited for you, you can support your skin color layer seem to be and seem and look and feel better.
Here’s a good very good persuaded day-by-day sensitive pure skin area good care to support your skin color layer.
1. Carry friction to the amazingly least when spending apart your plastic.
By the end of your day, the key thing which you are predicted to do is to deeply cleanse your skin color layer layer and the primarily level to the is to take away your cosmetic. Once you can, generate an do the job to carry the friction to tiny when challenge this as it might quite often group group get about ache and redness. Choose a weak tasteful remover that will handily break in the action up your cosmetic. And after that, correctly rinse it with a thrilling cleanser. Once you can, job with a tooth whitening skin gels cleanser that will quickly approach over your skin’s location and correctly support you to receive separately impurities.
2. Job with relaxing moisturizers and products.
Quickly shortly soon after you have cleansed your pores and skin level level, moisturizing this is a required step to preserve your pores and skin level level hydrated. Determine on a moisturizer and face cream that supplies anti-inflammatory residences which will support soothe your skin and pores and skin level level and heal any disease.
3. Look for the providers of a light sunscreen.
Sunscreen is certainly a great fundamental item found in your beauty approach even though you have personal hair follicles and follicles and pores and skin. Hence when you yourself possess very sensitive skin and pores and skin, it could conclude getting bothersome since the item can irritate your skin and pores and skin. But when you move with the correct one for your skin and pores and skin level, it’s under no situations going forward to conclude getting regularly a concern. Select a lighter sunscreen but support to make certain they possess a good amount of SPF insurance insurance policy coverage.
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myswisscosmetics.com
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My secret pet peeve is my frustration first for all those that fought for our freedom to come back and receive full health insurance but no actual health care and second that unlike the old days pre Obama care when I bought all of Savvy Turtle employees full medical, dental and eye care and handed it to them as a bonus each month to include paying for mine where I could go get what I need and skip the nothing burger red tape of government to post Obama care where all that is nonexistent
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James D. Wilson
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Nathanael hadn’t delivered any specific message; the angel’s parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes. Sixty-two people received medical treatment for injuries ranging from slight concussions to ruptured eardrums to burns requiring skin grafts. Total property damage was estimated at $8.1 million, all of it excluded by private insurance companies due to the cause.
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Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
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The other type of annuity is called a deferred annuity. This simply means you give the insurance company money either in one lump sum or over a period of years, and instead of receiving
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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Birds— and Territory My dad and I designed a house for a wren family when I was ten years old. It looked like a Conestoga wagon, and had a front entrance about the size of a quarter. This made it a good house for wrens, who are tiny, and not so good for other, larger birds, who couldn’t get in. My elderly neighbour had a birdhouse, too, which we built for her at the same time, from an old rubber boot. It had an opening large enough for a bird the size of a robin. She was looking forward to the day it was occupied. A wren soon discovered our birdhouse, and made himself at home there. We could hear his lengthy, trilling song, repeated over and over, during the early spring. Once he’d built his nest in the covered wagon, however, our new avian tenant started carrying small sticks to our neighbour’s nearby boot. He packed it so full that no other bird, large or small, could possibly get in. Our neighbour was not pleased by this pre- emptive strike, but there was nothing to be done about it. “If we take it down,” said my dad, “clean it up, and put it back in the tree, the wren will just pack it full of sticks again.” Wrens are small, and they’re cute, but they’re merciless. I had broken my leg skiing the previous winter— first time down the hill— and had received some money from a school insurance policy designed to reward unfortunate, clumsy children. I purchased a cassette recorder (a high- tech novelty at the time) with the proceeds. My dad suggested that I sit on the back lawn, record the wren’s song, play it back, and watch what happened. So, I went out into the bright spring sunlight and taped a few minutes of the wren laying furious claim to his territory with song. Then I let him hear his own voice. That little bird, one- third the size of a sparrow, began to dive- bomb me and my cassette recorder, swooping back and forth, inches from the speaker. We saw a lot of that sort of behaviour, even in the absence of the tape recorder. If a larger bird ever dared to sit and rest in any of the trees near our birdhouse there was a good chance he would get knocked off his perch by a kamikaze wren.
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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Product immediately after exercise insurance solutions
No investment insurance purchase in a very simple Prostatis action, even though he is trained only exception in the industry. There are many new threats that can lure the unwary with remote media policy is clearly insufficient for your needs. It is important to do your due diligence and scientific evidence, ask yourself just before the market does not provide a sound purchasing decisions. This short article will help you, just accept, shoulders that decisive action must begin with knowledge.
Those most critical factors giving a positive self basically want to cover the first edition. That's pretty strong earnings, unemployment, and some cannot Prostatis even be informed. Talk to your employer and give generally positive, they are not. Relevance Tab justified confidence that the business aspects, really, that this, after all, attractive to employers incentives, long-term employees, and where the only specialized services for industry and again the other for employees of highest quality that are more difficult problem to treat, made only more secure, since it is to find a person.
Although the direction of transmission of buying Prostatis insurance on their own, more attention is considerable, certainly in the sense that the plan to "complete" and "renewable insurance." This suggests that other, as you continue to receive payment of costs should not be fully covered by commercial insurance. Not even know that the level of demand in the economy Although in good condition I, and the company has taken the right path, and then joined a vague clause to complete the plan in principle and in its way through, you can also apply safeguards Generally they produce, the plan rescission period is 10 days during the working sets, make sure it's perfect, then throw the cards, if not immediately.
The scenario is especially the Prostatis fact that it contains the option to change the terms and other demanding applications. Currently, for many years a large number of hits includes hands. As "absolutely certain legal requirements" specialized insurance services for investment in more selective inside to be taken, especially in the stop position of education on the basis of a different plan that incorporates the experience, regardless evaluation or situations require the exercise includes products and services for the same price evaluation face to face selling. Similarly, principles and manipulated so as the experience of many destructive aspect of the current market containing the entire industry.
An insurance company to a higher potential, to ensure that purchasers or plans worth more to feel a little pressure, the result is inevitable that insurance is available against people who have contact to practice for a few days . Basically it is to maintain the power to print money to unrealistic levels.
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ProstateSolomon
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The Economics of Property-Casualty Insurance With the acquisition of General Re — and with GEICO’s business mushrooming — it becomes more important than ever that you understand how to evaluate an insurance company. The key determinants are: (1) the amount of float that the business generates; (2) its cost; and (3) most important of all, the long-term outlook for both of these factors. To begin with, float is money we hold but don't own. In an insurance operation, float arises because premiums are received before losses are paid, an interval that sometimes extends over many years. During that time, the insurer invests the money. Typically, this pleasant activity carries with it a downside: The premiums that an insurer takes in usually do not cover the losses and expenses it eventually must pay. That leaves it running an "underwriting loss," which is the cost of float. An insurance business has value if its cost of float over time is less than the cost the company would otherwise incur to obtain funds. But the business is a lemon if its cost of float is higher than market rates for money. A caution is appropriate here: Because loss costs must be estimated, insurers have enormous latitude in figuring their underwriting results, and that makes it very difficult for investors to calculate a company's true cost of float. Errors of estimation, usually innocent but sometimes not, can be huge. The consequences of these miscalculations flow directly into earnings. An experienced observer can usually detect large-scale errors in reserving, but the general public can typically do no more than accept what's presented, and at times I have been amazed by the numbers that big-name auditors have implicitly blessed. As for Berkshire, Charlie and I attempt to be conservative in presenting its underwriting results to you, because we have found that virtually all surprises in insurance are unpleasant ones. The table that follows shows the float generated by Berkshire’s insurance operations since we entered the business 32 years ago. The data are for every fifth year and also the last, which includes General Re’s huge float. For the table we have calculated our float — which we generate in large amounts relative to our premium volume — by adding net loss reserves, loss adjustment reserves, funds held under reinsurance assumed and unearned premium reserves, and then subtracting agents balances, prepaid acquisition costs, prepaid taxes and deferred charges applicable to assumed reinsurance. (Got that?)
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Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders, 2023)
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That’s why people who statistically have no need for insurance buy it. Or consider this: a person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of receiving $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of getting $9,499 will usually avoid risk and take the 100 percent certain safe choice, while the same person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of losing $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of losing $9,499 will make the opposite choice, risking the bigger 95 percent option to avoid the loss. The chance for loss incites more risk than the possibility of an equal gain.
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Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It)
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Jeff Dahl, a lawyer who worked personal injury claims in Florida for more than a decade, illustrates the ways that stagecraft—while manipulative—can be in everyone’s best interest. Florida, like many other states, likes to see lawsuits handled through mediation rather than cluttering up the court system. One time Dahl was serving as mediator between a thirty-year-old plaintiff, who had been injured in an automobile accident, and an insurance company. Dahl put the plaintiff and his lawyer in one room, and the insurance representative across the hall in another room. Both rooms had glass walls and afforded a full view of the opposing party. Dahl spent the better part of the next two hours moving from one room to the other, patiently hearing out each side and validating their concerns. The insurance company agreed to pay seventy thousand dollars, which Dahl knew was exactly the figure the plaintiff wanted, so Dahl expected to conclude the deal. Unfortunately, when the plaintiff received the offer he became temporarily intoxicated by the prospect of money and indicated that he wanted to hold out for more. Dahl knew that the insurance representative was not authorized to pay additional money. Fearing that the mediation would devolve into a bitter lawsuit, Dahl opted to engage in a little drama. Dahl marched into the room where the insurance rep sat waiting to hear that the plaintiff had accepted his offer. Instead of relaying the fact that the plaintiff now wanted even more money, Dahl said, “I need to know you are serious about this seventy thousand dollars and that it’s your best offer. If this is truly the case, you can communicate that to me in earnest by packing up your briefcase and leaving. After all, there is nothing more for us to do here.” At Dahl’s suggestion, the rep began packing to leave. Dahl used this opportunity to rush, panicked, to the plaintiff across the hall. “Oh no!” Dahl warned, “The rep is leaving and taking his offer with him! You’d better agree to the deal quickly, so that everyone can go home happy.” Minutes later, the parties got together to sign the papers. It’s important to remember that while what Dahl did was manipulative in the purest sense of the word, it was also intended to benefit all parties equally—and it succeeded in doing so.
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Todd Kashdan (The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your "Good" Self--Drives Success and Fulfillment)
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The rising cost of medical care has also been important; most employees receive health insurance as part of their overall compensation, and most research shows that increases in premiums ultimately come out of wages.16 Indeed, average wages have tended to do badly when health-care costs are rising most rapidly and to do better when health-care costs are rising more slowly.
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Angus Deaton (The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality)
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You can have the best health insurance in the world, but it will not protect you from a contagious disease. What protects you from a contagious disease is if your whole population – rich and poor – can receive the healthcare they need.
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Tom Whipple (A Little Light: 20 ways the coronavirus response could make the world better)
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christianbrothersroofingllc
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Remember, the Theory of Intimidation states that the results a person achieves are inversely proportionate to the degree to which he is intimidated. By developing techniques to dramatically improve my posture, I positioned myself for accomplishing my ultimate objective—getting paid. In the final analysis, what I really did was separate myself from the rest of the pack by learning how to cope with intimidating people and thereby increasing my chances of actually receiving what I earned. Specifically, as a closing drew near, I took three important steps to maintain my strong posture: I kept my finger on the pulse of the deal twenty-four hours a day so I could pinpoint the time and place of the closing. I continued to nurture my relationship with the buyer in the hopes that, at a minimum, I would have his moral support. I showed up at the closing with my attorney, and counted on the Universal Attorney-to-Attorney Respect Rule as my insurance policy if all else failed.
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Robert J. Ringer (Winning Through Intimidation)
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Half a million children in the United States currently take antipsychotic drugs. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)