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The Doctor Will See Your Credit Score Now
mytrip writes to mention that the same people who invented credit scores are working to create a similar system for hospitals and other health care providers. "The project, dubbed "MedFICO" in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patient's ability to pay their medical bills. But privacy advocates are worried that the notorious errors that have caused frequent criticism of the credit system will also cause trouble with any attempt to create a health-related risk score. They also fear that a low score might impact the quality of the health care that patients receive."
And no sense of common humanity, dignity and charity either.
Jesus loves you. He loves all greedy bastards.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
- As a financial instrument, insurance exists to distribute risk, not cost. Anybody who does not understand what the distinction is please vacate the discussion. Technically speaking, insurance is how one distributes risk and some approximation of communist government (in a literal rather than pejorative sense) is how one distributes cost. Trying to use the former to approximate the latter is inefficient and raises the costs for everyone.
- For all the inefficiency and expense of what passes for health care in the US, the US also has the best health care outcomes in the industrialized world and generally by a wide margin. If you have cancer, your survival rates in the US are much better than Europe on average and the best in the world in absolute terms. This is true by a number of other direct metrics of health outcomes and holds across the population even if you are an average person and not a wealthy person. Americans are paying more but they are getting more, and survival rates for a pretty broad swath of nasty things is 20-40% better, not buried in the noise floor. This is the good part of the US health care system that no socialized system has ever emulated. Americans compensate for being unhealthy (and car accidents, etc) in mortality rates with really good medical outcomes. If you normalize for genetics and environment, Americans live longer than anyone else. Of course, many Americans have crap genetics and have a crap diet as far as longevity is concerned.
- Before the Americans get too smug, the American health care "system" (there is no system, it is a market) is byzantine and inefficient. It should cost nowhere near what it does even for what Americans get.
- All Americans have health care, even those that cannot afford it, and the idea that there are people without access to health care is a myth that inflames the clueless and serves the purposes of political propaganda. The quality is mediocre, but what do you expect with socialized medicine. It is not hypothetical, I was one of those invisible souls raised on government health care for the destitute.
What we really have is a number of facts. The European system produces mediocre results in terms of actual health care outcomes (what we are nominally paying for), but it is relatively inexpensive. Americans pay a lot but have the best health care outcomes in the world. Americans pay far more than is strictly necessary by any reasonable metric, but I guess they can afford it. Americans are also bearing the cost of most medical technology innovation, amortized in the American medical market; when is the rest of the industrialized world going to carry their fair share of that burden?
In short, all the systems suck. That said, I would be reluctant to give up the superior health outcomes (what I pay doctors for) and medical innovation of the American medical environment. On the other hand, I wish they were more efficient at what they do. Clearly there has to be a better way, but by every metric that matters to someone getting health care, replicating the European system is not it.