Billed Amount - what the provider/health system tags as the “billed amount”
Allowed Amount - what the insurer sets as the actual total $ allowed to change hands for the visit
Patient Responsibility - the portion the patient is responsible for.
The Billed Amount is supposed to exceed the Allowed Amount by 2.5-5x typically so that the Allowed Amount the insurer/provider has negotiated “saves” money thanks to Insurance ostensibly in how the bill is displayed.
Put differently, your provider/health system is supposed to per the billing contract put in an inflated value well in excess of expected payment so your insurance company can reduce it so you can “save money” superficially on your bill. It is as smoke and mirrors as it sounds. Sounds like your provider / HS forgot healthcare billing 101 in this case.
The Billed - Allowed Amount value is also usually called Contractual Adjustment
Although there are separate China & non-Chinese apps, you hit the nail on the head for why a potential acquisition both has serious risk and is going to be a fire sale of TikTok given the 45-day deadline. These are issues which normally would take months to resolve at minimum and would also need a period post-close where operations were slowly separated and Bytedance was still involved for knowledge transfer.
If the acquirer, can make it work, it will be the greatest tech M&A deal since Facebook acquired Instagram in terms of long-term return.
Anecdotally, although I still rate TikTok's algorithm as better than youtube, the real difference is the long-term engagement. TikTok is always able to deliver content that is interesting to me......Youtube recommendations have a habit of delivering "stale" recommendations for long-term users.
I was just sort of noting this to a roomful of relevant engineers in the hopes of gathering some support for strengthening encryption and got talked down by one of them and nobody else cared enough to say anything.
No, but I will tell you that over 10 years of watching this unfold and using Windows for about half of that time I think I've got some ground to stand on. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with this move and playing right into Apple and friend's hands. They are over complicating something that shouldn't be complicated (Desktop, Mobile, and Server are the only valid "flavors" to be releasing at this point).
Interested in market/economics as in he's a professional (or extremely serious individual investor), or interested as in he's a hobbyist who likes reading finance news and occasionally making "cool" investments?
He's an ex-economics teacher (now retired) that does pretty well in the market. I'd say he's in the category of hobbyist who likes reading finance news, too.
So I'm probably getting blinded by availability bias bc you said finance, but these T-shirts look solid. I can't really think of anything etsy-like that would fit. I'd assume he's a fairly cynical guy:
What do you think of this extension of your analogy:
Financial debt has an interest rate, but you take it out because you believe the return on the proceeds raised adds more value than the cost.
Technical debt is meant to (ideally) be the same. As long as it's outstanding and compounding, it should be because your return on business value will be lower if you "pay it back", then if you do not and spend time/resources elsewhere.
if your discount rate is 30%+ per annum, this makes for some counter-intuitive conclusions about when it's smart or not to "finance" with technical debt.
While I agree with you on time vs. shortcuts, I do think it's a question of valuing explicit time vs. opportunity cost that's a depper issue here.
My opinion is that whether it's programming or general white-collar work, most cases of doing it "the right way" vs. "the dirty way" tend to be about investing the "certainty" of lost time immediately for the "promise" of savings.
For some things, the tradeoff is pretty decent (taking time to improve core knowledge or relevant skills that are related to goals).
But for a quickly growing company, how many situations are there where a "hack it out" fix that costs time in the long run is a net win in opportunity cost and hence long-term value?
If a shortcut that will cause you headaches in 9-18 months also allows you to add critical features at an accelerated pace for the next 6 months, is it:
(1) inefficient because you net lose man-hours or
(2) efficient
(a) maximizes your near-term growth trajectory,
(b) thereby increasing potential access to resources and hence long-term growth
To be clear, I do agree with your statements about shortcuts usually not saving time especially when you deal with teams/setting standards.
My point is more that while time saved/lost is easier to mentally calculate, it alone is not really what's driving value in many situations.
There's also the inherent problem of using qualitative terms that mean different things to different people.
That's a dangerous attitude that makes sense for some startups, especially those with high burn rates.
"If we don't get traction/product out the door now, we won't be able to raise our next round, so we have to get this product out the door yesterday to de-risk the whole company falling apart when we run out of money in a few months." Then later you raise your round and do the same thing for the next round. Eventually, of course, it will catch up with you and slow key progress. If you're unlucky that leads to a down round and you're all screwed.
I see that as being a larger risk than competitors moving faster in the sort term (them moving faster short term may mean you move faster long term). Higher burn rates mean you have a clearer deadline for fundraising, means you're racing the clock, means you're incentivized to take on technical debt. I'd love to have a look at what really tends to kill companies more often, but it's just anecdotes and speculation from me today.
It's definitely a dangerous attitude, this is also the problem with anecdotes, we all start postulating strawmans.
I would point out though that in the financing-focused case you gave, although you have a definitive slow down from technical debt, it's still an open question whether or not it's actually a net slowdown vs the "status quo" scenario.
In practice of course, every individual company, with different teams and different contexts, has to find the right "cognitive bias" for themselves.
Billed Amount - what the provider/health system tags as the “billed amount” Allowed Amount - what the insurer sets as the actual total $ allowed to change hands for the visit Patient Responsibility - the portion the patient is responsible for.
The Billed Amount is supposed to exceed the Allowed Amount by 2.5-5x typically so that the Allowed Amount the insurer/provider has negotiated “saves” money thanks to Insurance ostensibly in how the bill is displayed.
Put differently, your provider/health system is supposed to per the billing contract put in an inflated value well in excess of expected payment so your insurance company can reduce it so you can “save money” superficially on your bill. It is as smoke and mirrors as it sounds. Sounds like your provider / HS forgot healthcare billing 101 in this case.
The Billed - Allowed Amount value is also usually called Contractual Adjustment