Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

The answer is simple: $$$$

The St. Petersburg Times ran a good story this morning looking at donations to politicians in the state of Florida by… Health insurance companies and other groups who stand to see a decline in their windfall profits if the Federal Government actually reforms healthcare.  Now, you may be saying, “But the insurance companies aren’t making that much money…”  Um, right!  Has anyone actually looked at how much they make?  Why don’t I see this in the news?  Here’s just one company’s profits (one that insures me) – Humana:

• 2008 profit: $647,000,000
• 2007 profit: $834,000,000

Where does that profit come from?  Overcharging people like you and me for their medical needs and paying out less in costs than they receive in premiums.

Think about it.  If you took that money out of healthcare expenses, that would be $647 million less individual consumers would have to pay for their health care.  That is what a government, not for profit option would do: It would substantially reduce the cost of health care for individual consumers by cutting out the profit motive.  As long as there is a profit motive in health care, it will cost a lot more.  This is precisely why the US pays more in healthcare per person than any other nation in the world.  It has nothing to do with “the best” healthcare and everything to do with profit for insurance companies.

If Humana is at all representative of other health insurance providers, then it is no wonder that the coffers of politicians nationwide are filling to the brim as the health insurance providers, who have a virtual oligopoly on health insurance and get tax breaks as a result of legislation they lobbied for, are trying to save their windfall profits.

So, if the public option dies, know why: Health Insurance companires in the US killed it.  Not with bullets, but with money.  The very money that would be saved by consumers if we went with a public option.  Oh the irony!

I posted Debi’s and my newborn photos a while back and asked people to vote for who they thought Toren looked the most like. Turns out, 2/3 of those who voted (pretty small sample, people) chose me (I’m parent #2). Now I find out that Toren looking like me is probably an evolutionary adaptation.

Here’s how it works: There’s no question about Toren’s maternity. He came out of Debi; so unless she injected an embryo at some point, he is her biological offspring. But my contribution was, how do we put this delicately, rather small. And, frankly, that level of contribution could have been made by any number of people (of course I’m not saying it was; I’m just saying that the amount of time required means paternity is always more of a question that maternity). Ergo, evolution has tended to favor babies who look like their fathers. Why? Fathers will be more likely to care for the babies if they look like them.

This was kind of confirmed by the following photo of mine:

Ryan at about one

Now compare that photo with this one of Toren:

Toren looking like his Dad

(It’s hard to argue that Toren’s mouth is basically identical to mine in this photo.  His eyes are pretty similar as well.)

Toren does look like I did when I was young.

But, here’s the ironic twist of evolution: Toren isn’t really likely to look like me by about the age of 20. When asked to match offspring with parents at 1, 10, and 20, people could match offspring with fathers very well at 1, okay at 10, but no better than chance at 20. Matching children with mothers was no better than chance.

Ergo, evolution has, once again, developed a nifty trait to ensure the survival of our offspring – babies look like their fathers, at least until they are old enough to fend for themselves. Pretty slick!

One of the ideas I talk about every semester in my Introduction to Sociology classes is the declining birth rate in developed countries.  There are several factors that help explain the low birth rates, but one of them is the cost of children.  In agricultural communities, children can be a net positive for parents – they can be put to work on the ranch or farm to make the parents money.  But for most parents in developed countries, children simply cost money, lots of money.  I’ve seen various estimates, but most put the cost of raising a middle-class child to the age of 18 at around $250,000.  Because I consciously think about things like this, I will admit that it factored into our decision to only have 1 child; we can’t afford any more children.  So, I have a pretty good sense of how much Toren will cost us to raise.

But what I didn’t know is how much Toren would cost from conception to delivery.  I’ve spoken with several people who said that it was a $15.00 co-pay for their child.  Wow!  Lucky them!  Toren wasn’t nearly so cheap.  I tracked every single expense we had with Toren to get a sense of how much he actually cost to deliver.  Keep in mind, I have insurance through my work and I think it’s decent insurance – not the best, of course, but decent.  Here’s the rundown of expenses:

• amount billed by insurance – $26,798.17
• amount allowed by insurance – $19,565.21
  • insurance discount – 36.72%
• amount paid by insurance – $13,802.83
• amount we paid – $5,762.38

Now, keep in mind that both Debi and I have a debit card through our insurance plans that receives money every month to pay for medical expenses.  We used both of our cards to pay as much of the $5,762.38 that we could, but still ended up basically writing a check for about $2,000 when all was said and done.

If you want to see the actual expenses in spreadsheet form, you can download my spreadsheet here.

This illustrates some rather interesting points.  First, the fact that we have insurance means we only paid about 9% of the total amount billed us for the pregnancy and delivery.  There was a 36% discount off the top for having insurance, the insurance covered about 45% of the bill, our debit cards covered about 10%, leaving us with 9% to pay out-of-pocket.  If you didn’t have health insurance, rather than having to pay the $2,000 or so we did, we would have had to pay $26,800.  No wonder the single biggest cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical bills.  If you don’t have insurance I have no idea how you could afford to have a child.

The second point is – Wow!  It costs $27,000.00 to have a child?  The Obama Administration is currently trying to reign in the cost of healthcare in the US.  I’m certainly not lamenting the high quality of care we received – having a neonatologist on-hand when Toren was born very well may have saved his life.  And having an emergency C-section may very well have saved both his and Debi’s lives.  So, I’m not complaining.  But I wonder how much this would cost in other countries?

One of my former students sent Toren a very thoughtful gift – Capital: Volume I (1st US edition to boot).  Capital (or Das Kapital) is perhaps Karl Marx’s most famous work.  Thus, the gift is Toren’s first book by his namesake. Ever since the book arrived I’ve wanted to do a photoshoot with Toren and his book.  So, here we go:

The smile suggests he likes it...

But it clearly is tiring for him (as I'm sure plenty of current and former graduate students out there can relate).

I'm pretty sure he's struggling with the concept of "species being" here, which can confuse even the best of us...

In the end, it was just too much for him at 4 weeks...

(Props to Steve K. for a very thoughtful gift!  I figure it will be a very effective tool at putting him to sleep in the not too distant future, until he understands it…)

(Props to Mike N. for sending this!)