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GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

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Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#81

Post by rosser »

conanbatt wrote: post #66
rosser wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In universal care you dont get access to 'clinical trials and research and things like that... [citation needed]

The US has substantial incoming medical tourism. If it really were strictly worse to european alternatives (more expensive or lower quality) europeans would not go to the US.

> if it were strictly worse...

Ohai goalpost. When did you get there?

The existence of .eu-to-.us medical tourism is utterly orthogonal to the availability of research in those countries. If you honestly took ten minutes to try, you'd be able to find dozens, if not hundreds of trials in every .eu member state, plenty of which are at least comparable to, if not more advanced than what's available in the US.

I could go to .eu or .in or .mx or .th, or any of dozens of other countries, to get access to medical treatments and procedures that are by many, if not most, measures superior to their alternatives available here, but which aren't available here (just one, token example: RISUG), or are vastly more expensive here, but have comparable — or, again, better — outcomes there.

Most of those places offer varying degrees of socialized, if not universal, medicine.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#82

Post by tanin »

RickJWagner wrote: post #6

It's obvious the CEO cares greatly about this issue. But not quite enough to reduce the percentage that GoFundMe rakes in with every donation.

Gofundme doesn't take any fee on certain countries (including US) https://support.gofundme.com/hc/en-us/articles/203604424-Fee...

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#83

Post by conanbatt »

jimrhods23 wrote: post #43

We need to get rid of health insurance companies. They are the reason all of our costs are massively inflated. The same thing is happening in education: universities know that a large percentage of students are getting financial aid, so the true costs are buried in a layer of bureaucracy. Fees and administrative fees continue to go up and the universities will always get their money. The students are then on the hook…

> We need to get rid of health insurance companies. They are the reason all of our costs are massively inflated

This is not correct. Insurance is a very valuable service to prevent high-risk events, and applying insurance is a very hard problem. You need to do economics, operations, fight fraud, etc.

What does create price insensitivity (and thus doesnt allow for the competition that drives down prices and increases value to happen naturally) is that you use healthcare for menial transactions like annual checkups or sick visits. I find it incredible when people complain about the 150U$S annual fee on OneMedical, when a basic check-up visit is billed between 300 and 500 dollars. Or when people get surprised that a cancellation fee for a primary care visit is 100 dollars, when "their copay is only 20 bucks".

In addition, another thing is that its tied to the employer, which means that you dont get to choose the insurance you want. If people had to choose their own insurance, insurances would cater to patients not to companies. This is probably the single most important change to do on healthcare reform, and one thing both Bernie Sanders and Republicans could agree with.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#84

Post by conanbatt »

jjordan wrote: post #79
jimrhods23 wrote: post #43

We need to get rid of health insurance companies. They are the reason all of our costs are massively inflated. The same thing is happening in education: universities know that a large percentage of students are getting financial aid, so the true costs are buried in a layer of bureaucracy. Fees and administrative fees continue to go up and the universities will always get their money. The students are then on the hook…

Maybe it's naive, but I always thought that Medicare played a big role in our inflated healthcare costs. Think about it: the number one demographic using the system has most/all their expenses covered by an entity that doesn't care how much things cost. Doctors and hospitals then price accordingly, and everyone else paying out of pocket gets screwed because the system is priced to favor its biggest users, who never s…

This concept of "Cost shifting" exists, but there is some academic debate if its actually whats happening. Medicare also does something invisible to the patients: it pays the least and has the highest stringent requirements for providers.

You need to be up to code to the last detail, you will be under scrutiny for your documentation, you have no bargaining power and medicare pays 20-50% less to providers than private insurance.

It is also not the same as PPO's (which most employees in HN must have) you will have a lot fewer options for care. (remember, you can only get a doctor that collects a much smaller fee, so forget about swanky offices and convenient locations)

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#86

Post by toomuchtodo »

1123581321 wrote: post #41
Brendinooo wrote: post #31

>Or the Tennessee couple who want to get pregnant, but whose insurance doesn’t cover the $20,000 worth of “medications, surgeries, scans, lab monitoring, and appointments [that] will need to be paid for upfront and out-of-pocket” for in vitro fertilization. Would an ideal healthcare system cover in vitro for anyone, full stop? Took a buzz through the NHS requirements[0] and there are definitely restrictions. And in v…

Agreed. Were the US to adopt a system similar to the NHS, I would hope that electives like IVF would continue to not be covered. Presumably it was chosen because the number is more shocking than the typical $500-2,000 request to cover a deductible or the less kindly viewed request to cover living expenses during a medical situation.

[deleted]

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#87

Post by 1123581321 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #86
1123581321 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Were the US to adopt a system similar to the NHS, I would hope that electives like IVF would continue to not be covered. Presumably it was chosen because the number is more shocking than the typical $500-2,000 request to cover a deductible or the less kindly viewed request to cover living expenses during a medical situation.

[deleted]

That’s the same link as the one in the comment I replied to.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#89

Post by jjeaff »

badfrog wrote: post #45
sharkweek wrote: post #4

I like to write short stories in my free time. One that I’ve been working on over the last year is one where the concept of “crowdfunded healthcare” evolves into a dystopian game show where people go on TV and share their sob story on why they need money. Then the viewers at home get to choose who gets the show’s prize money each season through a bracket style voting system that crowns a champion at the end. I had to…

The show Undercover Boss is kind of like that. Every episode some CEO realizes that all of their employees are underpaid, picks one with an especially sad story, and gives them some money to pay for their kid's surgery or college tuition.

I thought the same thing. And they never seem to come to the realization that maybe a lot of their employees are underpaid. No, it's just the ones with stories that go best with violin music playing in the background.

And one of the most delusional CEOs was the Hooters guy. He was talking about how he would be perfectly fine with his daughter working at Hooters. Then the manager where he was undercover was found to be a total pig. Making the waitresses compete for time off by eating canned beans with their hands behind their backs. He also talked about "inspecting" the "product" on a daily basis to make sure the customers stay happy. It was a gross display of abuse.

Of course, he didn't even fire the manager later. Had this episode not been 10 years ago, I think #metoo would have had both the manager and the CEO fired within a week of the episode airing.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#90

Post by conanbatt »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #54
badfrog wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if all the bureaucracy of insurance went away, major operations would still likely be tens of thousands of dollars. How do you suggest people pay for that?

We all do! Something something single payer. Edit: not sure why the downvotes, that’s the reality of things. If you want a more fully fleshed out thought, here you go: We would all contribute to the payment of expensive operations via taxes in a single payer system. In the current system we have insurance payments. It’s effectively the same, paying a small fee regularly, to subsidize the costs for expensive procedure…

> We would all contribute to the payment of expensive operations via taxes in a single payer system.

That's just insurance, managed by the state.

> But with single payer, we cut out companies in the middle pulling a heafty profit

Oh boy. Lets say I concede, for the sake of argument, that government can run a private business with the same efficiency, and that the profits it would make as private are given back to its consumers (healthcare.gov cost almost 2 billion dollars to make, remember that. Or Blue shield is actually a non-profit, and its not gobbling up the space by reinvesting its supposed profits).

To add to that, the profits of healthcare insurances companies are not that large: they have a 6% operating margin, lower than other insurance companies. Cumulatively, the big companies must have around 20~30 billion dollars a year in profits. It's a staggering number, but in the healthspace thats nothing: only the subsidy of tax-exemption for insurance benefits is estimated to be 260 billion a year. You could eliminate that benefit and expand medicaid: but that would help the poor, and wreck the rich and the middle class together, which is often politically unfeasible.

https://www.axios.com/profits-are-booming-at-health-insuranc...

https://www.verywellhealth.com/health-insurance-companies-un...

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