Category: <span>Uncategorized</span>

Updated: Apparently I’m living in the past, and hadn’t yet educated myself on the implications of the Affordable Care Act. While I knew that the ACA protected people from being denied coverage based on pre-existing conditions, I didn’t know that this was universal across all providers (not just the ones available on HealthCare.gov), and that it also prevents insurers from hiking rates based on them. Of course this is all true only as long as the ACA isn’t repealed or whittled away, so if you care about this issue make sure to vote!

In case you needed it, here’s some more evidence of just how broken Health Insurance really is in the United States.

On Friday, I received a letter in the mail from Regency’s “Condition Manager Program” with enclosed materials that “may be helpful to you.”

Dear Participant:

Enclosed are materials from the Regency Condition Manager Program that may be helpful to you. Please look them over and we encourage you to discuss them with your doctor. You can call us toll free at 1 (800) 267-6729 with any questions.

The Regency Condition Manager Program is a free health management program sponsored by Regency BlueShield.

The program provides information, education and support to help you learn more about your condition. You should still see your doctor. If you have any concerns about your health, you should contact your doctor. In an emergency, call 911 or your local emergency services number.

Thank you for allowing us to be a part of your healthcare management team. We look forward to speaking to you again soon.

Sincerely,

Your Regency Condition Manager Team

Enclosure(s)

And the condition that the letter refers to? Diabetes.

Here’s the thing: I have never had diabetes. I’ve never been diagnosed with diabetes. I’ve never been treated for diabetes. I was on a medication a couple of years ago that could cause an increase in blood sugar levels, but I’m no longer on the medication, and never needed any intervention.

So my health insurance provider decided unilaterally that I have a pre-existing condition that I don’t actually have.

Presumably they did this based on a badly designed and poorly tested matching algorithm running against their customer database, (I refuse to use the word “patient” since I am not one, and even if I were, I’m not theirs.)

I can’t tell you how messed up this is

For those of you who live outside the United States, or if you’re young enough or fortunate enough to have never had to contend with the pre-existing condition rules we have here, here’s the skinny:

If you have been diagnosed with a condition, and your health insurance ever lapses for more than 30 days (90 in some states including Washington), you are now in a situation where no insurance provider will pay for care related to that condition. Ever. Period. End of story. You’re screwed.

Even worse, some insurance companies are even in the habit of denying coverage as a matter of course if you have a pre-existing condition, and hoping that you won’t contest the decision—which can often be prohibitively costly for the patient. You’re screwed again.

This practice should be illegal

There should be no way for an insurer to attribute someone with a medical condition without an explicit diagnosis and provision of covered care for the specific condition.

Just because you have some mediocre DBA on your cost-control team who had the bright idea that they could mine your customer database to find people who need help managing chronic conditions, doesn’t mean that you now get to decide they have some health issue that they don’t have.

Diagnosis is done by doctors, not database analysts. And certainly not computer systems.

Hey Regence: Stick to what you know

Health insurance companies should stick to the business they understand: Forcing sick people to sell their homes and declare bankruptcy in order to pay for unjustifiable profits for their shareholders and investors.

Oh wait. Did I just say that?

We fixed the problem

I did call them, and the customer service representative was “happy to fix this for you.”

When I told him why I was so concerned, and suggested that they really need to look into fixing the bug in their computer system, he said, “Oh, I know—we’ve been getting complaints, and they’re working on a fix.”

I’ve been working with multiple displays since at least 2004. Back in those days I had a 17″ PowerBook G4 with a PCM/CIA card that provided a second external DVI output. It was slow, but it worked, and for the programming I was doing the lacking performance was not an issue.

For the last few months, I’ve been using a Sorbent USB 2.0 adapter to provide a second video output for my Mid-2011 MacBook Air, so I had two external displays, and the laptop itself for 3 total. The problem is that this MacBook Air doesn’t have USB 3.0, and USB 2.0 just doesn’t have enough throughput to drive a large display, so it had a lot of lag—too much to really be acceptable.

I’d been looking around for solutions. The problem is that all of the Thunderbolt docks can only really drive a single external display unless one of your monitors is itself a Thunderbolt display, which can work via Thunderbolt pass-through. But recently there have been more and more USB 3.0-based docks that support Mac OS X.

So I picked up a Kanex KTU10 Thunderbolt to eSATA Plus USB 3.0 adapter, and an Etekcity USB 3.0 dual monitor dock for my late-2011 MacBook Air. This dock has two USB 3.0 ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports, and two display outputs (HDMI and DVI), and the Kanex adapter should in theory provide a USB 3.0 port which the dock needs.

After a little dance with installing the latest DisplayLink driver (2.3 beta), they totally work.

So for about $200 (only a tad more than the cost of one of the single-display Thunderbolt docks), I’m running with three screens again, and the performance is perfectly acceptable for most things I will ever need to do.

Plus I’ve got gigabit Ethernet, more USB 3.0 ports, and an eSATA port which will be great for backing up my machine to an external drive.

Overall I’m very pleased.

We took the verticals that FounderDating Network Cofounder members (those members who have indicated that they are interested in finding cofounders) selected as markets they are interested in started a company in and compared the last six months with the same six months one year ago…

– via Founder Dating

It comes as little surprise to me that the verticals that seem to remain pretty stable include commerce, small business, advertising, cloud services, and enterprise. To my mind, this is reflective of how our economy intersects with technology in a fairly general sense. Of course mobile is still big, and I believe most investment in mobile is driven by commerce (including advertising) and business needs, with cloud services serving a supporting role. It is interesting though that mobile startup investment seems to be reaching a plateau rather than growing or declining.

It’s also no surprise to me that the wearable and smart home verticals are on the rise, given the buzz around “Internet of Things”, health-data scenarios, and clean energy over the last few years. Interest in these verticals has existed for a long time, but investment is happening now for two reasons: maturing new technologies are finally enabling them, and our social norms are changing. It of course remains to be seen whether there will be a bubble in either wearables or smart home startups, but for the moment there’s a scramble to deliver new products and services in both spaces, and there’s a lot of room for growth over the next few years.

The consumer electronics rise is probably related in part to wearables and smart home, though it’s interesting to contemplate what might be happening if some portion of that rise is independent. (I’m not going to do that here though.)

To me, the most interesting stand-out in the Founder Dating verticals report is an apparent decline in interest doing startups in the data & analytics space.

Is Big Data investment waning?

I see more and more job listings these days, in all sorts of technology disciplines that call for “a passion for big data” or “proven ability to analyze data for customer insights”. In part at least [big] data analytics seems to be getting absorbed into the broader technology toolbox—that more an more “Big Data” is seen as a core competency, or from another point of view just another part of the “cost of doing business.”

Simultaneously, the idea of Big Data driving markets in-and-of itself seems to be dwindling. And I think this is a good thing.

Data by itself is just data even if it’s Big

I’ve felt for a few years now that there’s been an over-emphasis on data for its own sake, at least the way it’s been marketed so far: More data, more types of data, more sources of data, more users contributing data, etc.

There’s certainly been a huge rise in data warehousing and reporting capability across the many industries touched by high-tech. And many companies have made at times extravagant claims about how Big Data will revolutionize all aspects of your business (technology or otherwise).

It’s true that we can now store, search, and retrieve information with a capacity and speed that was unimaginable even two or three years ago. But for the most part, availability and cost-effectiveness of data collection and reporting by itself has not (so far) revolutionized our lives or our businesses, except in a few niches—web search and social networks being two of the most visible.

It’s the analysis, stupid!

Take Facebook and Twitter in the social space, Google in search, or 23andMe in the consumer DNA analysis space. For at least these verticals there’s also been a correspondingly large investment in data analysis—probably in nearly all cases a much larger investment.

We need to understand that good data analysis requires a lot of creativity, long-term investment in tools and algorithms, and an iterative development process—all of which is far from free. The data by itself is just bits on a disk somewhere.

Access to vast amounts of data has indeed been a fantastic aid that has driven broad, albeit often incremental improvements in decision making, product design, and operational efficiency. More rarely it’s enabled completely new product spaces, though without a real data analysis component, most of the new markets that have opened up have been related to data warehousing. The mere availability of lots of data has not so far been a panacea. And it may never be.

It’s certainly true that we take for granted today that we have comprehensive map data at our fingertips.

Ultimately though, the most interesting Big Data scenarios require that we aggregate and correlate vast data-sets in ways that ask specifically designed questions, and which report results that can be interpreted as effective, meaningful, actionable answers to those questions. (Remember Douglas Adams’ 42?)

And so far asking the right questions is still nearly completely in the domain of human beings.