[jbattle]

A) How did AOL end up paying "a million dollars each" if they have insurance? B) Everyone close to those parents would know who they were. A baby in the hospital is something that people hear about. So now those parents get to feel singled out, guilty, blamed, etc. for "screwing things up" for the rest of the company.

What an ass

[andzt]

Agree with you on the ass part. But to give you some information:

A) AOL most likely self-insures... Why? Exactly because of catastrophic events like this increasing your premiums for all of your thousands of employees, even though most of them are probably healthy and low risk. Insurance companies don't care! It's usually better to self-insure until you run into these catastrophic insurance events. B) Agreed. It's disgraceful for any executive of any company to publicly share any type of individual insurance information. Also, borderline illegal.

[TonyCoffman]

Like many companies - they are likely self-insured. If that is true, then they pay the actual costs of the claims right out of their pockets rather than participating in a larger risk pool.

I agree - it's completely disgusting to bring these costs up in that context.

[gcb0]

Unless they are in the group that collected 401k monthly and left to another employer ;)