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Medicare To Require Hospitals To Post Prices Online (pbs.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: Medicare will require hospitals to post their standard prices online and make electronic medical records more readily available to patients, officials said Tuesday. The program is also starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for costly new forms of immunotherapy to battle cancer. Hospitals are required to disclose prices publicly, but the latest change would put that information online in machine-readable format that can be easily processed by computers. It may still prove to be confusing to consumers, since standard rates are like list prices and don't reflect what insurers and government programs pay.
Likewise, many health care providers already make computerized records available to patients, but starting in 2021 Medicare would base part of a hospital's payments on how good a job they do. Using electronic medical records remains a cumbersome task, and the Trump administration has invited technology companies to design secure apps that would let patients access their records from all their providers instead of having to go to different portals. Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also announced Medicare is starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for a costly new form of immunotherapy called CAR-T. It's an expensive gene therapy that turbocharges a patient's own immune system cells to attack cancer. The cost for such a procedure can exceed $370,000 per patient.
Likewise, many health care providers already make computerized records available to patients, but starting in 2021 Medicare would base part of a hospital's payments on how good a job they do. Using electronic medical records remains a cumbersome task, and the Trump administration has invited technology companies to design secure apps that would let patients access their records from all their providers instead of having to go to different portals. Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also announced Medicare is starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for a costly new form of immunotherapy called CAR-T. It's an expensive gene therapy that turbocharges a patient's own immune system cells to attack cancer. The cost for such a procedure can exceed $370,000 per patient.
Dammit.
just an excuse for hospitals to keep you and run lots of tests. happened to a family member where she spent a month in the hospital and was told she might have cancer only to leave diagnosed with a bacterial infection. and one of my kids. a day in the ER with an MRI and lots of other tests only to be diagnosed with strep.
people need to accept the fact that medicine is not perfect and doctors don't know everything and not sue anytime a diagnosis is wrong
No need, they'll just post stupidly high prices and your insurance company will negotiate the rate after anyway.
Here is the simple reality of the medical system. IT is full off overpriced and downright illegal pricing tactics. when people see what medical systems have the balls to charge you compared to other services around especially on a global scale... there will come a change. having a basic universal health coverage will be totally doable once people figure out they are getting charged $1000 for a dose of Tylenol and nip that crap in the butt.
Hospitals overcharge for pretty much everything. Any prices they show shouldn't be trusted anyway.
It's another example of why insurance is nothing but a scam.
Also dental, and I imagine vision, too. Nobody can tell you what something is actually going to cost you out-of-pocket, because the insurance company will say "we'll pay this much", but when the doctor/dentist goes to submit the claim, they say "oh well we're only really going to pay this much, LOL" and the patient gets stuck with the bill. WHY IS THIS ALLOWED!? If it were anything else I'm pretty sure it would be considered fraud.
Old people vote.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hey, nice spin.
They are preventing a small child (not toddler, he can't toddle, having never been conscious in his life), in a vegetative state, from being kept permanently in that vegetative state, after two years of legal wranglings with the parents, where NO OTHER REPUTABLE DOCTOR in the world has been able to suggest anything but palliative care (one tried, was thrown out of court for being an absolute quack - heard much of him recently?), and who has been on life-support his entire life, FOR FREE, WITHOUT CHARGE, EVER. Taken to court, the Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Supreme Court, and ALL said "Nope, he has no chance of a life, we need to end his life-support" despite multiple appeals.
Being held in a hospital ON LIFE SUPPORT that fucking morons are trying to storm to "free" the child, against the parent's wishes and legal orders, disturbing other patients (including children and parents in worse situations), harassing and threatening medical staff (who are nothing to do with it) and generally running up the fucking costs to the taxpayer.
P.S. Learn your fucking country's procedures. NOT ONE GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE has any say whatsoever in if the child is treated or not (without life-long, free and constant permanent treatment the child dies, with it he merely never gains consciousness, and there's not a reputable doctor in the world that disagrees). The courts have decided. Many of them. Several times. More times than even people who seek legal euthanasia in another country require.
So... BOLLOCKS to your spin. Because it's utter shite and keeping a boy who could be in constant pain and suffering alive to keep his parents happy, at ENORMOUS medical, policing and legal cost... FOR FREE. He's vegetative. Brain-dead. Never seen the light of day. A brain destroyed from birth by a neurological condition that's entirely untreatable and will only worsen. And an army of doctors kept him alive by default without question for two years while the legal wranglings go on, and they may be ordered by a court of law to "cease treatment" (i.e allow him to die naturally, rather than sustain him artificially for his entire life).
It's almost like it has nothing to do with expense, but what's right for the boy, isn't it?
P.S. Look up the Bambino Jesu hospital the parents want to send him to. It's a fucking Vatican-funded profit center, scam-host and shithole.
Before you comment on that as a statement against the NHS, go work in one of their hospitals and see the doctors and nurses crying and fighting all day to save the child, and then being threatened, attacked and harassed in their own homes for doing so (My girlfriend worked in Great Ormond Street... same thing, about six months ago, similar case, the people "protesting" were fucking cunts just out to spoil for a fight, and even the parents were pleading them to go away. I think the child's name in that instance was Charlie Gard or similar?).
i will be sure to leave by rotting stinking corpse in front of a hospital so all their customers can enjoy the smell of death as they go in to visit the hospital
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Therefore, this will not directly impact most consumers, who usually want a prepared list, not raw data.
Of course it will. It will let bots scrape the price lists, so that consumers can comparison shop on third-party websites, probably ad-supported.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In reviewing insurance bills for a recent uncomplicated procedure, the hospital billed a total of $65000 and the insurance paid about $8000 after prenegotiated discounts were applied.
The insurance then ran into a technical problem/mistake in which it was retroactively cancelled. The hospital actually returned their payment. During the year it took to straighten that out, I was facing $65K in bills that they wouldn't negotiate to less than about $30K despite the existence of documentation that they had been satisfied with $8K from insurance. Needless to say, I focused on (and eventually succeeded in) reversing the insurance problem.
I've heard that the real reason for this is so they could write off $65K if a patient doesn't pay instead of $8K. I'm not an expert in the accounting, but I'm sure in my case that is what they would have been claiming as their loss.
The experience left me with a solid belief that posting prices alone would do nothing. That approach will only serve to drive more people into the wasteful net of insurance.
What is needed is a truth in pricing act. Hospitals should be required to have fixed, public, non-negotiable prices that apply to all payees whether insurance or cash. If the hospital chooses to pay some of those themselves in indigent cases, that is the price they should be allowed to write off. This approach would make some true headway in getting the insurance problem reigned in.
Posting their false prices does nothing except bolster their already drastically inflated claims of losses.
About 15 years ago I was working a shit job with zero benefits - so no medical coverage. My shoulder was hurting a massive amount and the problem wasn't going away. I went to a local medical service to have it checked out but could not get them to give me any kind of estimate of the cost for just looking at my damn shoulder. You have to just accept whatever they decide to charge you after the fact.
No other business that I know of can get away with this.
* it was bursitis
-- Will program for bandwidth
Needless to say, I focused on
The problem with USA health system. You shouldn't have to focus on anything other than recovery and going on about your life.
My own experience in Australia:
1. Had a hernia
2. Went to the doctor. He asked which system I wanted to be referred to, waiting list on the public system was 4 months. I said private.
3. Went to private specialist. He quoted $8900 including a week at the hospital, gave him my insurance number, he said that my gap will be $2200 after insurance.
4. Said fuck that went back tot he doctor and asked to be re-referred to the public system.
5. 2 days later I was in hospital for a triage appointment. Was classified as a very low risk so went in the 4 month queue and went about my life.
6. 3 weeks later get a call saying there was a cancellation do I want to come in for my op.
7. Went in the day after for the op.
8. 4 days later I was discharged from hospital with a prescription for painkillers.
9. Bought pain killers.
10. End.
Total cost to me: $3.50 for a 24 pack of strong painkillers subsidised under the PBS.
Yeah it could have taken 4 months, but I also had the option to have it fixed that same week with an agreed upon up front cost, but my cheap private insurance (which costs $600/yr before taking into account the $500/yr tax credits I get for having it) didn't cover that specific op so I didn't bother.
Hey, nice spin.
Sorry for cutting out most of your post (for brevity's sake), I agree with you completely.
It should be noted that Alfie Evans' parents are not rich people. In fact they're barely even middle class. Should Alfie have had been born in the United States to parents who worked blue collar jobs, the insurance company would have turned off the life support after the FIRST doctor gave a terminal diagnosis, let alone waited 2 years for the umpteenth appeal. That's if their insurance covered it at all. Under the US system, we wouldn't even know about Alfie Evans, he'd just be another anonymous infant mortality statistic. The NHS kept him alive long after most other systems would have given him up.
So allow me to echo the parent poster's sentiment. Fuck off with your spin.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.