#underwriting

Underwriting vs. Overwriting: Which Are You?

There is so much advice floating around out there about how important it is to follow the expected and established word counts in the industry. For example, many agents, editors, and publishers will not consider works that fall outside of expected word count ranges, and it may even be a reason to reject the work.

The reason is pretty simple: these word counts have been established based on…

 Thanks for the ask!

 The first thing I would recommend is to not worry about it in your first draft. Just get the bare bones down on paper.

 Once you go to edit/rewrite the scene, you need to figure out what it’s supposed to accomplish. Character development, moving the plot forward–it could even just be a light, fluffy scene that goes nowhere. Having a solid outline helps with this a lot, but isn’t necessarily necessary.

 Then, with a goal in mind, ask yourself if it achieves that goal already, and if not, what is it missing?

Description adds meat, but too much can create excess fat that just needs to be trimmed later (Still better than having too little meat). Give the reader a clear idea of where and when they are, what the weather is like, who’s around the character(s).

Mixing action with your dialogue adds meat, and make it tastier too! Someone chuckling and leaning back against a fence as they talk to someone adds characterisation and paints a clear picture for the reader.

 Finding your voice (Hard to do on a first draft) will often add some volume to your work. When starting out, it’s hard to do much more than get your ideas down in their most basic forms. It sucks, it’s not satisfying, but it’s the first step towards a beautiful finished work!

 Personally, I am an underwriter myself, so I feel your pain. My first draft of my first novel was about 85k words. It felt shallow and boring, and unoriginal, since I had yet to find my own voice. Now it’s 141k, and much closer to what I envisioned.

 Best of luck, and if you have any more questions, I’d be glad to help.

I’m looking for more sources on this because it’s so fucked up that I almost don’t believe it’s real.

Apparently Graham-Cassidy would allow discrimination against the chronically ill to an extent that is even worse than it was before the ACA. In order to understand this, please take a moment to read these definitions from my earlier post on insurance vocabulary.

Pre-existing condition: This is a big one that I think many people misunderstand. A pre-existing condition is a health problem you have before being covered by insurance. So, for example, if you develop a health problem while you are uninsured, that is a pre-existing condition. If you develop a health problem while you are insured, but later on you have a lapse in your health insurance, that condition becomes a pre-existing condition. If you have a health condition, but you’ve never had a lapse in insurance coverage since diagnosis, you do not have a pre-existing condition. You can switch from one insurer to another without having your condition labelled pre-existing as long as you are covered continuously and do not have a lapse in between.

Before the ACA, insurers could discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions (see Underwriting below). This is now illegal.

Underwriting: The insurance practice of analyzing individuals based on their risk and charging them more if they’re considered riskier. For example, with home insurance (where underwriting is legal), you might get charged a higher premium to insure your home if it’s located where floods are common. In medical insurance, before the ACA, this resulted in higher premiums or even complete denial of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. This is now illegal in medical insurance under the ACA.

Alright, so the essential thing here is that before the ACA, insurers could not hike up your insurance rates, even if you were sick, unless you had a lapse in coverage. So, even if you were chronically ill, you could protect yourself by being extremely careful to never allow your insurance to lapse - easier said than done, but possible.

But what I’m reading is that Graham-Cassidy would not simply remove protections for people with pre-existing conditions, but would also allow insurers to jack up the rates on people who become ill WHILE COVERED under an individual market plan.

Imagine that you’re healthy and you’ve been paying $200 a month for health insurance for years, while only using maybe $20-$50 of health services per month. You’re clearly operating at a loss, but you’re doing it because that’s what insurance is all about: pay now, benefit later. You expect your insurance to someday be there for you when you need it.

Then you get sick, and you start needing the occasional $2000 MRI, or $10,000 hospitalization, and your monthly prescriptions cost $100. Hey! That insurance you’ve been paying for all this time is finally going to pay off. It’s going to cover you, right?

Oh, yeah, sure, it’ll cover you. But your rate is going to go up to $1000 a month, which you can’t afford, so you don’t get to keep having insurance now that you need it. And you can’t afford the out-of-pocket medical costs either, so you just don’t get the healthcare you need, and you get sicker.

Or maybe you can afford it, but you find that most months you’re still paying more for insurance than it would have cost for you to cover your costs out of pocket, so what was even the fucking point of buying insurance in the first place?

Shit like this is the reason behind my ever-present advice, in so many of these posts, to get yourself covered under employer-sponsored insurance if you’re chronically ill, if that is in any way possible for you. The individual market isn’t safe for us, not these days.

https://thinkprogress.org/trumpcares-back-and-now-it-will-let-insurers-jack-up-premiums-as-soon-as-you-get-sick-38fff5001bf9/