Hey, good news! I've been upgraded:



Interestingly, though, it wasn't my use of an expletive in my previous post on this topic, it was the use of the Vice President's name, "Dick," in this post about his latest legal foibles.

So there you have it, kids: Curse all you want, but try not to discuss the Vice President in public. OK?

Michael Moore's newest documentary hype-machine, Sicko premieres this Friday. In the movie, Mr. Moore is going to tell us, through rather dramatic footage and hand-picked testimony from industry whistle-blowers that insurance companies are evil and exist only to screw over the American people. He was on The Daily Show tonight and told Jon Stewart that insurance companies are profit making businesses, and that the only way they can make a profit is by charging huge premiums and then not paying claims.

Well, before this turns into a "story with legs" and it becomes impossible to say anything about insurance that contradicts the movie, please allow me to share some of what I learned from five years of working in the insurance industry:

1) Insurance Companies Rarely Make Money Selling Insurance
Most of the time, insurance companies pay out slightly more in claims and operating expenses than they take in from premiums. Here are some facts:

The Insurance Information Institute:

Combined Ratio is the ratio of losses and associated expenses to premiums, reflecting the overall underwriting profitability of the company. If it's below 100 (i.e., losses + expenses < premiums), then the company is making money from its insurance policies. If it's more than 100 (losses + expenses > premiums), they're losing money. You'll note above that as of 2004, the industry average had remained above 100 since the 1970's.

More sources:

The Motley Fool:
The industry's average combined ratio in 2005 was 106.2%.

ISO:
In 1995, the industry average combined ratio of 106.3% was the "best combined ratio in seven years."

Carinsurance.com (speaking about all Property/Casualty insurance, not just car insurance):
The 93.2% estimate for 2006, if accurate, would represent the industry's best underwriting performance since the 93.3% combined ratio recorded 70 years earlier in 1936 [and only the second underwriting profit since 1978].

So how do they make money? Glad you asked:

2) Insurance Companies Make Money Investing Their Premium Dollars While They're Waiting to Pay Claims
This is called the "float." Basically, the insurance is an excuse to hold onto your money and make a return on it, until you hurt yourself, crash your car, or damage your home, at which time the insurance company has to give the money back to you (plus, on average, a few dollars more). Note the second and fourth columns in the chart above. While losing 5-10% on their insurance policies, these companies make more than 10% on the cash their holding (in more recent years, this number is typically more like 15%). Here's Wikipedia:

An insurer's underwriting performance is measured in its combined ratio. The loss ratio (incurred losses and loss-adjustment expenses divided by net earned premium) is added to the expense ratio (underwriting expenses divided by net premium written) to determine the company's combined ratio. The combined ratio is a reflection of the company's overall underwriting profitability. A combined ratio of less than 100 percent indicates profitability, while anything over 100 indicates a loss.

Insurance companies also earn investment profits on "float". "Float" or available reserve is the amount of money, at hand at any given moment, that an insurer has collected in insurance premiums but has not been paid out in claims. Insurers start investing insurance premiums as soon as they are collected and continue to earn interest on them until claims are paid out.

In the United States, the underwriting loss of property and casualty insurance companies was $142.3 billion in the five years ending 2003. But overall profit for the same period was $68.4 billion, as the result of float.

So you see, Mr. Moore, denying claims is not the "only way they make money." In fact, it's one of the worst ways...

3) Therefore, the Path to Profitability for Insurance Companies is in Writing and Keeping More Policies, Not in Paying Less Claims
This is the hard part for many people to understand, which is what Michael Moore is counting on in his movie. The Insurance Company's biggest concern is that you go get insurance from someone else, not that the frequency and size of your claims. Of course, they'd prefer that you make less claims, but if you feel like they've screwed you over, you'll go somewhere else, and some other company will get to invest your premium dollars instead of them.

4) Everyone Who's Ever Had a Claim Denied Feels Like They Were Screwed by Their Insurance Company
It's an unavoidable fact of life. And yes, there are insurance companies out there (particularly small ones that don't have access to the investment vehicles that the larger ones do) who think they can turn a profit by screwing over customers. But for the most part, insurance companies are setup to attract and retain customers. There are three groups:

Underwriters: These folks are basically lawyers. They write policies with very specific legalese language in them. The intent here is not to screw over the customer, per se, but to avoid a catastrophic loss on the policy. In other words, they write the policy with loopholes that prevent them from having to pay an exorbitant amount of money on a single claim or event. This is the closest thing to "screwing the customer" in the company.

Actuaries: The actuary is a number cruncher. He/She sifts through tons of experience data, and based on as much information as he/she can know about you, decides how much premium to charge for the policy, as written by the underwriter. If the actuary does his job, combined ratios stay within the normal range (i.e., right around 100%).

Claims Examiners: The claims examiner is the customer facing person. He/She is judged on his/her ability to maximize payment speed and hence, minimize loss administration expenses. Re-read that last sentence, because it's important. The claims examiner does not get rewarded for paying smaller claims. He/She gets rewarded for paying claims quickly in order to avoid additional administration costs associated with dragging the process out. This is why a claims examiner on a homeowners claim will generally print you a check when he/she comes to visit your damaged home, or why a health insurance company will automatically pay a doctor a pre-set agreed upon price for a service. It's all about keeping the customer happy and keeping costs down, so that you'll stay with the company and they can continue to invest your dollars.

5) Doctors are Motivated by Profits Just as Much as Insurance Companies
A related point that Mr. Moore will make in his movie (and that he made on The Daily Show tonight) is that doctors need to "ask permission" from insurance company representatives before providing you with treatment. Setting aside for a second the fact that this is typically untrue (the company will usually quote a reimbursement rate - the doctor is always free to provide the service at that rate), it ignores the fact that without that kind of check, doctors would be heavily incented to run a full battery of tests on every patient they see, since they ultimately make more money the more procedures/tests they run. Instinctively, no one wants to tell a doctor he/she can't do a test he/she wants to do, because instinctively we all want to believe that the doctor is ordering the test solely to benefit the patient. But the hard, cold fact is that doctors can be every bit as profit driven and/or corrupt as insurance companies. And if you think health care costs are rising today, imagine what it would be like if we did CAT Scans for the common cold.

I'm not saying I have answer to how this should work, but Mr. Moore's suggestion that insurance companies "go away" is clearly not the silver bullet.

So, please enjoy the movie. I encourage you to see it. I will probably see it myself, although it might take me a while, owing to the need for a babysitter before I do. But please keep the above thoughts in mind while you watch, and remember - you heard it here first, before it became grossly unpopular to say it.

OK, so Dick Cheney's assertion that he's not in the executive branch will rightly receive a ton of airplay over the next few weeks and months (years?), possibly replacing the "shot a guy in the face" line as the most popular disparaging remark about the Vice President. What can I say - he made his own bed on this one...

Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, on the other hand, points out the funniest thing about the whole affair by far:

IMPEACH CHENEY IF YOU WANT, but do bear in mind that he'll preside over his own impeachment trial.

No, really. The Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. The Vice President is the President of the Senate. He presides. The Constitution provides for only one exception in cases of impeachment: "When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside." That's because of the obvious conflict-of-interest of having the VP preside when the President is tried. But there's no similar provision for having someone else preside if the Vice President is impeached.

(Hat tip: Scalzi)

 

OK, one more from Jason Bennion. My blog rating:



A "G" Rating? FUCK!!!

Quite a bit to comment on from Simple Tricks & Nonsense tonight.

Jason thinks Dr. Jones looks pretty good in this picture, taken this past week on the set of Indiana Jones, Part IV:

Indiana Jones - 2007

Oh yeah? Take a look at this eerily similar picture from 1989:

Indiana Jones - 1989

Arthritis. Why did it have to be arthritis? I HATE arthritis...

(still looking forward to the movie, though...)

OK, a new internet quiz (hat tip: Jason Bennion)

Find the International Space Station in this picture:

Answer in the first comment below. No fair peaking!

Back in February, I bought myself a new PC which included the ultra-nifty 2407FPW 24" widescreen monitor. When I get back to posting entries in the ISBS Tech Guide (shut up, I will so...), I plan to do an entire entry on this monitor. It is just that cool.

Anyway, last Friday, I'm on the phone with my wife and she says, "Oh, by the way, there's a grey stripe down the middle of the monitor. You should take a look at that when you get home." Turns out the grey stripe was a series of alternating 2" lines of black pixels and working pixels running the entire height of the monitor, just to the right of center. Possibly dead pixels, but more likely some kind of power problem in the monitor itself, since the odds of so many pixels blowing out all at once (and in a repeatable pattern) are fairly low.

I called Dell Technical Support at around 10pm that evening. Here's roughly how the phone call went:

Me: My monitor is broken (explains the black lines)

Dell: OK, please unplug it from the PC so we can verify that the problem is your monitor, and not your video card. Are the lines still there?

Me: Yes.

Dell: OK, is there another computer you can plug the monitor into, so we can verify that the problem isn't related to the PC at all?

Me: I have a laptop. Hold on. (finds serial cable, plugs in monitor, lines are still there)

Dell: OK, let me confirm your address and we'll send you a new monitor. It should be there within 5 business days.

That was late on Friday night.

The new monitor arrived at my house at 9:15AM on Monday morning. I plugged it in, tested it, put the old one in the box it came in, slapped the included shipping sticker on it, and called an 800 number to schedule a pick-up. On Tuesday morning, the old monitor was gone.

I was very impressed with this incident. The CSR on the phone asked me two very logical questions, ensuring that a new monitor wouldn't have shown up and had the same problem as the old one. She didn't put me through unnecessary tests (diagnostics, virus scans, etc.) that I've seen in the past as part of the standard operating procedure for other support desks. She also didn't suggest that I send the old monitor back to a manufacturer for repair, pay some sort of service/shipping fee, or even leave my house to deliver the monitor somewhere for shipping.

Perhaps my only complaint was the 5-business day estimate, when in fact the new monitor showed up after 15 business minutes. I understand that delivery dates are hard to predict and they're hedging with their estimates to keep me happy, but if the part in question was time critical (say, a hard drive rather than a monitor), I may have made contingency plans assuming a 5-day outage. Still, though, no one ever got fired for finishing their work early!

Support is typically a thankless business. It's very easy for people who have had a bad experience to declare the company insensitive to its customers, while folks who have a good experience declare the company a personalized, free business center. Both parties can find supporting anecdotal evidence to reinforce their impressions (especially in the blogosphere).

At the end of the day, though, what impresses me is an efficient, customer-focused process, as opposed to a dedicated, proactive individual (not that both is a bad thing, of course). The former ensures good customer experiences most of the time; relying on the latter leads to a wide breadth of experiences, ranging from amazing to downright frustrating.

UPDATE: Ironically, it turns out there is one company that did announce a personalized, free business center today. :-)

The Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino will pay Paris Hilton $800,000 to host her own Get Out of Jail party. Says Us Magazine's source, "It was in the works and signed before she went to jail."

But wait, there's more. NBC will pay her a cool $1 million for her first post-jail interview with Meredith Viera on the Today show. She won't talk to Matt Lauer, you see, because he made "disparaging remarks" about her. Poor thing...

And here's the kicker: ABC is pissed off because Barbara Walters spent so much time schmoozing her mother, Kathy, and wound up with nothing for her efforts. NBC's President & CEO Jeff Zucker sealed the deal with a call to her father, Rick.

I wonder if advocacy groups will be suing The Hard Rock and NBC for equal treatment when their clients are released from jail...

For reasons defying explanation, I get my hair cut at the local salon (where my wife gets her hair done). I'm currently sitting in the chair, waiting for the hairdresser, and listening to the following conversation between three women of, well, let's say of a certain age...:

Woman #1: Yeah, she gambles so much, all the hotels in Atlantic City give her all this free stuff.

Woman #2: Really?

Woman #1: Yeah...

Woman #3: That's OK, it's better than giving all that money to a psychiatrist.

Interesting theory...

Today is apparently kid-blogging day here at I Should Be Sleeping. Check out this story about a woman in Illinois whose baby monitor has started picking up live video from the Space Shuttle Atlantis:

Since Sunday, one of the two channels on Natalie Meilinger's baby monitor has been picking up black-and-white video from inside the space shuttle Atlantis. The other still lets her keep an eye on her baby.

Live video of the mission is available on NASA's Web site, so it's possible the monitor is picking up a signal from somewhere. "It's not coming straight from the shuttle," NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean said.

Summer Infant, the monitor's manufacturer, is investigating what could be causing the transmission, communications director Cindy Barlow said. She said she's never heard of anything similar happening. "Not even close," she said. "Gotta love technology."

Gotta love it, indeed...

Wow...

A massive toy recall could have millions of parents taking their children's favourite toys away.

On Wednesday, RC2 Corp. recalled about 1.5 million Thomas the Tank Engine wooden railway toys in Canada and the United States, due to concerns that the paint used on them may contain lead.

My kids are pretty much past this stage, but I can tell you from experience that taking away a Thomas the Train toy from a kid who already has one (or, in some cases, dozens) will not be a pleasant experience...

I've avoided blogging about the Paris Hilton saga, because I find the whole thing to be nothing more than a trumped up soap opera, starring Paris Hilton as the forlorn victim, and our criminal justice system as the bumbling fool.

That said, today's episode, in which Paris calls her mother from jail while her mother is coincidentally on the phone with none other than Barbara Walters, who promptly launches into an interview which is then immediately released to the media hounds, contained two rather irresistible quotes. First, Paris on her on-screen persona:

"I used to act dumb," [Paris] told Babs. "It was an act. That act is no longer cute. It is not who I am, nor do I want to be that person for the young girls who look up to me."

Next, Paris Hilton on what it's like to be in jail:

"I was severely depressed and felt as if I was in a cage...It was a horrible experience."

Well, Paris, it's like this: you ARE in a cage. That's the whole idea. So much for losing the "dumb" act for those young girls who look up to you...

Tune in next week, when every activist group you can think of sues the LA County Sheriff to get someone in their group free publicity equal treatment under the law. Future episodes will also include interviews with Paris' new spiritual advisor, her dramatic release from prison, her declaration that she's found God, and the launch of her new Ronald McDonald-like home for children.

Oh, and as long as I'm here, one last note: the article I linked to above (from E! Online) is flanked by an add for Paris' reality show, The Simple Life, with a new episode airing this Sunday at 10pm on E!. Coincidence? No more than anything else in this post, I suspect...

Reporting live from Yankee Stadium...It's Bat Day today in the Bronx.

The game started at 1:05. It is currently 1:30, and there are already 3 bats available for sale on eBay.

I have two (one for each kid), and on my way to my seat, someone offered me $200 for one of them. He obviously doesn't understand the need to have two of anything when you have two children...

So this is weird: the guy who took this picture also took this picture.
(Hat tip: Mel Kramer)

Which do you think will wind up earning him more money?

My son, Avery, in the car this afternoon, passing a bank: Daddy, what does ATM stand for?

Me: Automatic Teller Machine

Avery: Daddy, what's a teller?

My son just got a Target Gift Card for his birthday. Check it out:

My, we've come quite a way with these things, haven't we?

OK, what's cool about this isn't so much that it's a beverage chiller, but that it's a beverage chiller that plugs into a USB port.

 

After a disappointing post-season last year, talk around New York baseball fans/writers was about whether or not the Yankees should trade Alex Rodriguez.

A-Rod silenced those voices this year, by having what could arguably be called the best April in the history of baseball: a .355 Batting Average, 14 Home Runs, 34 RBIs, a .415 On-Base Percentage, and an .882 Slugging Percentage. Most of these statistics led the league.

But consider this: what would fans and sportswriters have said if their "28 million dollar man" wound up April with a .235 Batting Average, 5 Home Runs, 11 RBIs, a .361 On-Base Percentage, and an .422 Slugging Percentage?

Because that's what he did in May.

Of course, April's stats are the only ones that are published on their own; May's are baked into the season-to-date numbers, hidden forever to anyone who doesn't know about ESPN's Splits page. I get the feeling, though, that had A-Rod's first two months of 2007 been reversed, and April 30th saw him hitting .235 and embroiled in a couple of on-field and off-field scandals, that the New York sharks would be smelling fresh meat.

Once again, perception meets reality and clocks it upside the head...

Check out this demo of Milan, Microsoft's new "Surface Computing" product. It's a really slick, touch screen computer built into the surface of a table. They've got some silly applications (a paint program), as well as some more interesting ones, like a photo slideshow/viewer where pictures and video can be moved around the table and resized by stretching them (a la Apple's iPhone), and a restaurant application that shows interactive menus (the restaurant kind, not the computer kind).

It can also recognize real world objects. The glass of wine you ordered can be tagged so when you put it on the table, the table can "label" it with the kind of wine, the winery, or other advertising/promotional content. And when you're paying the bill, it can recognize your credit card, and let you split up the bill by dragging pictures of what you ate onto your credit card (not an icon depicting your card, mind you, but the card itself). When you're done, there's a "Pay" button on the table that applies the charge to the card.

CNET's review says the units will cost roughly $10,000 and will start appearing in stores, casinos, hotel lobbies and other public spaces soon. I think this is one of those breakthrough technologies that needs some critical mass to really catch on. Once that happens, mass volume production could make it cheap enough to show up on desks in offices and schools, as well as various places in the home. The kitchen table is an obvious choice, where something very much like the restaurant application would be useful. But what about the bathroom vanity? Imagine a vanity that identified your medication for you, told you how much to take, or reminded you when it was time to refill the prescription.

Back in the '90s, my employer had a "vision of the future" center that would postulate just these kinds of things, but the Internet was brand new then, and desktop/touchscreen technology had not advanced to this point. Now, it seems like we've achieved a point where it would pass the Mom & Dad test...

The second of my two monthly features is the familiar How People Found Me, because when it's not about the pageviews, it's all about the keywords.

I've chosen to do this in two sections - categories and keywords.

The Categories

Category	Count
Billy Joel	163
Technology	140
Celebrity Look Alikes	80
Overrated Films	21
DSL	20
Al Gore	18
Steven Wright	17

My four posts on Billy Joel's latest tour and single release (the playlist, the concert review, the song review, and the song lyrics) have been a HUGE Google magnet. In the month of May, 163 different search queries brought people to one of these four posts. That's more than five unique queries per day!

Similarly, my various posts about technology issues (specifically Blogger, Google, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, my new Dell PC and HP Laptop, and my Tech Guide reviews) have caught the attention of 140 unique queries. And a couple of posts I made on a lark about a site that does face recognition and suggests celebrity look alikes has garnered 80 unique queries.

The others on this list are smaller, but they surprised me in terms of how many people would think to search on them. A post on some random Top 20 Over-rated Films of All Time list generated 21 queries. A Ramblings article I wrote in December of 2004 about DSL installation brought in 20 queries. My review of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth yielded 18, and a couple of jokes I heard Steven Wright tell on Letterman one night brought on 17 (many of which, by the way, were flawed attempts to quote the actual text of Wright's jokes).

The Keywords

All told, over 700 queries resulted in hits to Familygreenberg.com in May. Here are some that I found the most interesting:

Query	Rank / # of Results	Comments
current event on tapeworms	1 / 217,000	That's me - worldwide authority on tapeworm news!
upsilon sigma alpha	3 / 745,000	It was just a joke! Upsilon Sigma Alpha = USA
oprah face recognition software	4 / 249,000	People really need software to recognize Oprah's face?
how to spell ""google"" as a verb	7 / 258,000	Err...G-O-O-G-L-E?!?
jerry seinfeld phil mickelson	7 / 13,800	Funniest golf game ever...
taylor hicks is sleeping in bed	8 / 168,000	As opposed to sleeping . . . where, exactly?
cartoon technophobe mother	8 / 715	Sounds like a rather arcane cartoon...
miraculous recoveries from female online liars	12 / 44,800	Those female online liars - they sure know how to bounce back!
whats the point in sleeping	13 (and 14!) / 8,560,000	I ask myself this all the time...
pronounce water philadelphia	19 / 269,000	Must have been some out-of-towner who couldn't get water in Philly & turned to Google...
will you give me some information about what happens to an underwater ecosystem after an earthquake?	35 / 45,500	This isn't that strange a query, I was just ammused at how the person spoke to Google like it was a person...
hasselhoff eating pizza	41 / 125,000	Obviously a slow news day...
elton john"" and ""tired of singing""	105 / 243,000	Maybe he should write the words & let that other guy sing, then...
working out porten	180 / 115,000	Now here's one of the few Google searches where I actually feel like I deserve a higher score!
atlantic city escorts	350 / 1,320,000	Speaking of working out Porten...(ok, that was a cheap shot...)
how much money would have ralph kramden have saved nasa	0 / 233	Pow! Zoom! Right to the moon!!
famous people out of marlboro hs / marlboro nj	>500 / 122,000	Really? 122,000 webpages about this? Must be short web pages...
all important people born in oh.	>500 / 2,470,000	A slightly longer list (but only slightly...)
greenberg puppy	>500 / 122,000	Not in my house...
mac consultants +erode	>500 / 102,000	What are they implying here?!?
pun of the year	>500 / 1,450,000	To all who knew me growing up - yeah, that's right - someone googled "pun of the year" and wound up at MY site...
should couples sleep separate at their first wedding night	>500 / 1,060,000	Maybe that's what led to the second wedding night...

I may be falling behind on my ISBS Tech Guide (I'll start again soon, I swear!), but Google Analytics has provided me the tools to create two monthly features. This is the first of the two - the site health check. Rather than explain it, I'll just show it to you:

Metric	April	May	% Change
Visits	1,792	1,441	-19.59%
Pageviews	2,132	2,563	-16.82%
Pages/Visit	1.43	1.48	+3.45%
Avg Time on Site	40 sec.	46 sec.	+15.00%
Bounce Rate	80.75%	78.42%	-2.89%
% New Visitors	91.63%	88.48%	-3.44%

Digging into the data a bit more (I won't bore you with details), it seems that overall visits and pageviews on the site dropped in May because Billy Joel's touring wrapped up (in April, roughly 900 of the 2,563 pageviews were Billy Joel related; in May, that number was roughly 450, which accounts for the net difference in pageviews on its own).

On the upside, people are staying longer, leaving after one page ("bouncing") less often, and returning more often. So all in all, things are going pretty well.