Bias in the ER • Hacker News Board

Re: Bias in the ER

#81

Post by ubernostrum » Sun, Feb 19, 2017, 3:20 AM UTC

throwawaydbdksn wrote: post #56

ubernostrum wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pass laws to protect physicians from frivolous lawsuits or at least limit damages Several US states have harsh caps on medical malpractice damages. They still see massively-rising medical costs. And in uncapped states the rate of growth in malpractice damage awards hovers very close to the rate of inflation of the US dollar. Which sort of destroys the argument that "frivolous lawsuits" and massive damage awards drive…

I don't need to make an argument. Call your doctor and ask him how much he pays for his malpractice insurance. I used to know some people in healthcare tangentially and the answer is $50,000 to $250,000 A YEAR depending on specialty etc. Sometimes the practice will pay these costs for you, so the doctor might not be paying it directly but the money is coming from somewhere. My friends told me malpractice insurance wa…

I used to know some people in healthcare tangentially and the answer is $50,000 to $250,000 A YEAR depending on specialty etc.

And... inflates at a rate which appears to be completely unrelated to malpractice damage awards. So calling for caps and limits on malpractice suits would not solve it.

Re: Bias in the ER

#82

Post by pacificish » Sun, Feb 19, 2017, 4:39 AM UTC

mvp wrote: post #26

eraboli wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to note is that the social priming studies in “Thinking Fast and Slow” are not very replicable [1] 1. https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...

Are only 'priming studies' in doubt? Or are most of the studies in social psychology in doubt today? The experiments and conclusions used to fascinate me, but once you lose trust it becomes hard to believe again. I used to think all these experiments are conducted on people vastly different from me or the people I interact with, so those findings are not applicable to me. But now it seems that those are not applicabl…

Maybe not all but here's another also with a reference to the priming kerfuffle http://andrewgelman.com/2017/02/18/pizzagate-kahneman-two-gr...

Re: Bias in the ER

#83

Post by throwawaydbdksn » Sun, Feb 19, 2017, 5:27 AM UTC

hellohappy1234 wrote: post #73

throwawaydbdksn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is everyone gets paid too much. Our doctors salaries are far out of line with most countries , we have the strictest drug pricing laws in the world, and people love to sue. We also have a significant portion of the population paying no medical bills while the rest is overcharged to compensate. On top of that our health insurance is full of middle men like "PBM's" that do nothing but raise costs. The combo…

I'm an ER Doc. The focus on illegal immigrants is way off base. There's a law called EMTALA which is basically an unfunded mandate that says, in part, we can't just turn away patients because they can't pay. This was because slot of hospitals (university of Chicago in particular) were dumping or transferring patients to other hospitals who couldn't pay and making huge news stories. As you mention, this means people w…

Doc, this was really well written and I can't refute it at all. Maybe I was a bit too racist here, lesson learned

Re: Bias in the ER

#84

Post by jdboyd » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 4:59 AM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #53

ubernostrum wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pass laws to protect physicians from frivolous lawsuits or at least limit damages Several US states have harsh caps on medical malpractice damages. They still see massively-rising medical costs. And in uncapped states the rate of growth in malpractice damage awards hovers very close to the rate of inflation of the US dollar. Which sort of destroys the argument that "frivolous lawsuits" and massive damage awards drive…

It's less the actual damages as much as it the defensive medicine that occurs because of the constant risk. If you show up with the flu, but it could be some weird disease that shows up in an MRI, the incentive for the doctor is to get you an MRI. I used to believe in caps, but I think we could do better than that. Create a no-fault insurance market that pays people without the hassle of civil trials. That has the po…

If MRIs were priced at what most people would call reasonable, then that defensive practice wouldn't be as big of a problem. We've seen prices of $100 to 300 mentioned for some other countries.