Slashdot Mirror
Hospital Prices Are About To Go Public in the US (ajc.com)
Prices hospitals charge for their services will all go online Jan. 1 under a new federal requirement, but patient advocates say the realities of medical-industry pricing will make it difficult for consumers to get much out of the new data. From a report: A federal rule requires all hospitals to post online a master list of prices for the services they provide so consumers can review them starting Jan. 1. The health care industry nationally has a reputation for having little price transparency, which can make it difficult for consumers to price compare. But the hospital's master list prices, sometimes called a chargemaster, is also not a complete look, consumer advocates say. That's because the final bill a patient receives is almost never the same as the sticker price for the services they received. Insurance companies negotiate discounts on the sticker prices. Co-pays, co-insurance, deductibles also add other layers of complexity that bring discounts or increased costs before a final charge is determined.
All this "oh we can't tell you the real price" bullshit needs to come to a screeching halt. This is just cartelism, or guildism, or whatever you can call it. It's an industry screwing us over because it can, and claiming technical difficulties prevent it from changing. It was bullshit when Microsoft did it with Internet Explorer and it's bullshit with hospitals.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That was not really an answer ...
I don't think US spending money on inefficient and unequally accessible health care help the security of other countries? Or do you think so?
Just start gradually reducing medicare eligibility age from 65 to 50. Cover all children below 10, call them unborn Americans and their hosts and give pre natal care and cover child birth for free. Gradually raise it 18.
Slowly allow people to buy into medicare. Eventually we will have a single payer system.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hopefully this is the first step in getting rid of insurance companies. The hassle of all this is what the insurance companies use to stay in business.
1. Billing errors are almost always in their favor. You either spend your valuable time haggling with them to correct it, or it gets paid because you don't notice it or don't have time to deal with it.
2. The time you spend correcting their mistakes also requires people working in the insurance company to correct them. Insurance companies are regulated by the state, and so they often need to justify their rates. The customer service people serve that purpose. The rates are often negotiated such that they are allowed to make a 10-30% profit on their "service". More expenses means more profit. This behavior, which would normally kill a business, becomes something that strengthens it because of the way government has their fingers in this industry.
4. Doctors now have full time people who do nothing more than haggle with the insurance companies to get paid. This further drives up the cost of care, which again benefits the insurance companies.
5. Because we have turned healthcare into an "insurance" product, you decouple a service from its price because everything is handled in aggregate. Remember from Finance 101, insurance products are designed to "make you whole" if an unlikely event occurs. Healthcare is a certainty, so paying for it as an insurance product makes no sense. That'd be like having "food insurance" or "housing insurance" to pay for your groceries and rent/mortgage. It is unnecessary and only adds cost. Then the added cost becomes a barrier and the insurance companies sell themselves as helping to overcome the barrier that they erected.
6. Healthcare is a giant jobs program. All those people haggling over costs would be out of a job things changed significantly. This is the main reason the system won't change.
7. Individuals cannot change the market because they do not purchase the insurance. Their employers do. Therefore, health insurance companies' customers are not the people receiving the service. Insurance companies provide just enough service to entice HR directors to choose them. Employers are interested in a healthy workforce, but at the end of the day it is a dollars decision that the employee does not get to make. This serves to distort the market.
Personally, I think the solution is to eliminate health insurance, and take the premiums that companies pay and just deposit that into the employee's health savings account. Then let the employees buy whatever they need. If they want insurance they can choose the plan that is right for them. Kinda like buying car insurance They can also just save the money and pay providers directly - but they need the up-front pricing information to make those decisions. For those that need assistance, the government or charities can deposit money into people's HSA is they need assistance. Then the market will return to something more normal simply because *** the people making the decisions are the people receiving the service. ***
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Healthcare is a certainty, so paying for it as an insurance product makes no sense. That'd be like having "food insurance" or "housing insurance" to pay for your groceries and rent/mortgage.
I was with you right up until that. Healthcare is not a universal certainty. When my kid was brought into this world it popped out, cried a bit and we had it home no fuss a short while later.
When my friend's came into this world it turned blue, straight into open heart surgery due to being born with transposition of the great arteries.
Now five years later and my kid hasn't had much more than butterfly stitch at a doctor. That same friend of mine had his in the emergency room getting a custom metal plate inserted in her head to replace her shattered skull when she landed face first on a rock after dismounting a trampoline.
My wife hasn't been to the doctor in 2 years. I have endless back problems and had a hernia done. Healthcare is a perfect example of how one person's life can be completely unburdened while another's can financially bankrupt them. The latter is definitely not a certainty.
That said I live in a first world country which has socialised healthcare so the concept of using insurance to fix this problem just seems so dumb.
As an outsider (living in Sweden, Europe) I am a bit curious, but mostly alarmed how the US have got such a seemingly malfunctioning health care system. Most other 1:st world countries (in Europe, Japan, South Korea ...) have some variation on a single-payer system, where hospital visits and drugs are in most part paid by everyone via taxes, without what seems like the bureaucracy of private or employer-paid insurance.
The advantage the EU and Japan have is that they don't have a huge underclass. This is changing as the EU is now committing suicide by importing a huge underclass. In California for example 1/3 of the state, a huge chunk of that illegal or anchor babies, is on free healthcare. Free. No co-pays to visit a doctor, no cost for medicine, no monthly fee. This is supported by virtually all legally working adults paying *lots* in taxes and getting nothing in return. It's unsustainable and will bankrupt the state. Working adults however pay hundreds a month just to have insurance, and the anger grows. To say that illegal immigration is killing the state is spot on. Citation: https://www.sacbee.com/news/lo...
Car analogy: Auto insurance covers catastrophic events like collisions. But what would happen if it also included gasoline?
So every time you refuel, you fill out a form, take it to the insurance department at the gas station, sit in the waiting room for 30 minutes while they negotiate the price with your auto insurance company, and when you are finally approved, you sign more forms indicating that you understand that gasoline is flammable and contains carcinogens and should not be consumed internally or sprayed in anyone's eyes. Then they dispatch a highly trained professional to dispense the gas, which is time consuming because there is a different nozzle specified by each insurance company, and your company requires the use of a low cost nozzle that doesn't quite fit your car. Finally, you receive a binder with all the forms and receipts for your tax records.
What would this do to the cost and hassle of owning a car?