381–389 of 389 posts
We're running a $10,000 bounty to assemble this information into a queryable database: https://www.dolthub.com/repositories/dolthub/hospital-price-... You get paid based on the percentage of rows you contribute to the dataset. So if you fill in 20% of the rows, you get $2,000. More details here: https://dolthub.awsdev.ld-corp.com/blog/2021-01-14-hopsital-...
This is amazing! Will the data be public after it's assembled?
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> I have never understood the US system of "co-pays" and found the whole thing very confusing. I think you're mixing up a few things here. The co-pays are meant to make the patient directly pay some of the cost to decrease abuse of the system. There are many different structures for co-pays so saying anything general is kind of difficult, but there are reasonable arguments supporting such a system. In Sweden for exam…
Not allowing an insurance company to negotiate for the price of a drug or service is precisely why medicare and medicaid have ballooned up to 39% of US federal spending while not even approaching "universal" coverage.
However, if your point is that the current system would also be improved by the tiny change of allowing medicare to negotiate prices without any of my other ideal changes, then yes I agree that would be a change for the better.
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Almost everyone benefits from universal coverage but the system has to incentivize patients to shop around for the optimal balance of price, quality, and convenience. Universal coverage does not need to incentivise shopping around in a single payer system. Also, the majority of patients are not capable of evaluating quality of healthcare, nor should they be.
Any system should incentivize shopping around unless it wants inflated cost. That or discourage frequent engagement (the US consumes comparatively massive amounts of healthcare product and service with inefficient outcomes). Our present system is _designed_ to prevent price comparison and shopping around via price opacity, network lock-in, state-level artificial supply barriers, etc. Universal coverage on par with Eu…
Better just to go with single payer healthcare, not linked to employment or insurance, and dramatically reduce costs with similar outcomes.
Everyone wins, and those with money can still buy private care or private insurance if they wish, truly shopping around, as they have the means, education and leisure time to do so.
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So it's a step towards a complete policy. What is the complete policy? Granted we might not see it enacted now, but it would at least clarify where the administration was headed.
Increasing supply of doctors by increasing residency funding, decreasing education costs, and decreasing the sacrifice that needs to be made to become a registered doctor. I have no idea why doctors need to sacrifice their entire 22 to 30 year old lives constantly slaving away, working on call, sometimes 24 hours at a time. Relax some of the draconian, outdated hazing rules. Attract more smart people, make it so youn…
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And by "current" administration you mean the Trump administration because people here don't like to give credit where credit is due.
I mean, we can discuss how much credit and where it's due, but I'm pretty sure "current administration", on a given date, makes it kinda apparent?
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MRI in Mexico cost ~$200 USD ( https://www.chopo.com.mx/zapopan/estudios/resonancia-magneti... ) and is way closer than Brazil. There are laboratories even at walking distance of the USA haha ( https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:4&tbm=lcl&q=lab... )
Might be interesting to check how much "Medical Tourism" happens between US and other countries. This might be an interesting industry to get into. If I remember well there was a health insurance company that was promoting Medical Tourism for their clients
A number of people, including me, have been building similar things, see http://price.hospital The problem seems to be figuring out a revenue model, and translating all the medical terms in to human.
Same, I've been mapping out CA average prices at http://hospitalprices-env.eba-r2yhwdcw.us-west-1.elasticbean... Comparing just the price of a hip replacement is difficult, because there are so many other services that will bundled in with a hip replacement (anesthesia etc) that may not be represented in the service price alone. The "average cost by diagnosis code a patient comes in with" transparency requirement is…
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So practically speaking, many Americans have to wait even longer than those in the UK? Even if they have insurance? And perhaps even a well paying job with good benefits (an assumption of mine based on the setting).
I don’t follow. What would they be waiting for?
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It's true that US doctors are paid more (although the gap isn't as big as it used to be). However, pay for US doctors makes up a fairly small portion of overall US medical expenditures (less than 10%). So, you could ask every doctor to work for free and not significantly change costs.
>pay for US doctors makes up a fairly small portion of overall US medical expenditures (less than 10%) That is likely too low. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provides a National Health Expenditure estimate annually. [1] Physician and clinical services represented $772 billion out of about $3.8 trillion, so more like 20%. Hospital services are the other big one: about $1.2 trillion. US physicians are p…
> In fact, physicians represent about 15% - 16% of the top 1% of income earners in the US.
This may be accurate, I'm unsure, but it wouldn't change that if US doctors were paid the same as their European counterparts, it would not make a truly significant change in overall US medical spending (this would even be true if doctors did actually make up 20% of medical expenditures, like you assert earlier).