Just nationalize the whole damn thing already.
...and make it 15 times as expensive, unfortunately.
Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
51–60 of 121 posts
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds great, but our US government has failed us for 30 years on healthcare. Not sure why anyone thinks that tax dollars would make the problem better.
Something like 40% of Americans already receive "government health care" in some form or other. Any government employees, military, police, teachers, fire fighters, and so on, receive health care. Anyone who qualifies for Medicare does. Just push that number to 100%.
The funny thing is that a lot of Medicare recipients or soldiers are adamantly against "socialism" in the form of government healthcare.
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#53For the past three weeks I’ve been going through a flare up of an autoimmune neurological condition. It’s been terribly painful. The treatment is high dose IVIG or plasmapheresis. Unfortunately my insurer doesn’t want to pay. I’m told if I had almost any other insurer they would. This has left me trying to find out just how much I’d have to pay out of pocket for either of these services. But absolutely no one knows a…
"The best option would be all providers must charge the same rate to all customers. Then I could look up the price and know it’s been prenegotiated by big insurance companies. "
This should be number one.
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#54As the person who submitted this story, I have a question: why was Sarah Kliff’s name removed from the headline? I submitted it with the same title it carries at CJR, which includes her name. The story is a profile of her and her work, so removing it makes the headline less informative, not more. And she’s not a celebrity, so mentioning her by name doesn’t make the headline any more clickbaity than it would be withou…
I find HN borderline propaganda. Its the only educated place on the internet, but the front page and comments is what HN whales decide.
You're not giving the community enough credit. We moderate the site, but we certainly don't determine it—and if we do something the community doesn't like, they are anything but shy in letting us know.
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#55Standardize the bill format across all providers, and provide EDI billing option, or a digital copy, and then we have something very easy to parse and store and make comparisons. Barring that, develop OCR parser. There's probably just a few programs that hospitals use that generate the bill paper so most formats could be profiled.
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#56Anecdotal story, a few years ago my dad had a heart attack. He was self employed, living the american dream so no insurance. He had to stay 2 nights plus ambulance ride. Total bill ~80k. I kid you not, 3 days after he got out my mom shattered her wrist and was taken to emergency surgery. ~40K. They wracked up a bill slightly less than their mortgage in under a week. Of course they could not pay and the hospital dropp…
That’s easy - medical debt isn’t written off by bankruptcy. So they’re pretty much guaranteed unending money.
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#57> If you are bitten by a raccoon, you can’t really decide not to get the rabies vaccine. It’s literally a life-or-death situation. But the price is incredibly high. This, to me, is a perfect example of why healthcare should be subsidized by the government (either directly or through a government-backed insurance plan that you receive as a fallback). Health isn't a good or service you choose to purchase. Demand is per…
Having a public option is the best way I think. In Australia, there is a private system and private insurance is fairly common, but when you can get generally as high or higher quality treatment free of charge in the public system, it makes it a lot harder for the private hospitals to charge crazy prices.
The only downside is that given underfunding there are waiting lists for a lot of ‘elective’ things so if you don’t have private insurance you might wait up to, say, a year for a hip replacement whereas you could get it done within a week or two privately. So I pay $1K a year for private insurance just in case.
But in our large cities the hospitals and emergency departments are as good as you’ll find anywhere so I always go to a public hospital in an emergency. You can even use your private insurance there so the state system gets some benefit.
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#58Anecdotal story, a few years ago my dad had a heart attack. He was self employed, living the american dream so no insurance. He had to stay 2 nights plus ambulance ride. Total bill ~80k. I kid you not, 3 days after he got out my mom shattered her wrist and was taken to emergency surgery. ~40K. They wracked up a bill slightly less than their mortgage in under a week. Of course they could not pay and the hospital dropp…
That’s easy - medical debt isn’t written off by bankruptcy. So they’re pretty much guaranteed unending money.
At least in the USA, this isn’t true. Medical debt can be discharged in bankruptcy.
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse - you can get a bill in the mail later for some out of network doctor who looked at a chart without ever interacting with you, in addition to the hospitals charge.
My favorite is that the hospital will use the external consultation to charge more for the visit.
Recruitment fee for the out of network you didn’t ask for!
Re: Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
#60I consider myself a "pragmatic libertarian", and by "pragmatic", I mean I'm in favor of legislative intervention when the free market often goes awry. Examples of this would be combating monopolies (since I don't want feudal system 2.0) , preventing immoral practices (like child labor), and controlling prices when there is no competition at work, such as utilities. It seems that with hospitals, there effectively is n…
The US government has put in place extremely heavy barriers to open a medical care facility. If we were to allow people to open facilities that compete with hospitals, we would very quickly see advertised prices and dramatic price drops. The medical cartel and all its bizarre non-market activities are a result of the existing legislation in place.