241–250 of 539 posts
Is there even a single non-political way that plan buyers can, even in aggregate, do something about this?
The sooner we can completely divorce healthcare from employment, the better.
Do you think that companies would give you a raise equivalent to what they were paying on your behalf for healthcare? I suspect not. I mean, it's one thing if we moved to a single payer system, which would be great, but just moving out of the employer's hands and into the general public seems like a disaster. (Also, I am not a fan of the employer healthcare model.)
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> I'm not sure many people that work at large companies realize that their employer knows every diagnosis, procedure, and prescription you've ever picked up, and actively trying to incentivize you to use as little healthcare as possible. I work for such a company, and it's great. I pay about $30 per month for a plan with a tiny deductible ($2,500), and they offer great wellness perks like weekly classes (yoga, kick-b…
> tiny deductible ($2,500) That's quite a large deductible.
If you are healthy and single, and have to get anything beyond a physical done, you get slammed paying the whole shebang out of pocket because you haven't put any money towards your deductible all year.
The greatest thing in health care over the past decade has been the explosion in Convenient MD urgent care centers and the like. It makes getting checked up when something needs to get checked up about as easy as going to Jiffy Lube, which is miles better than going to an ER or trying to thread the needle through the schedule for an appointment at your PCP.
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That's weird because in every other OECD country that offers "free" healthcare (as in, single-payer or two-tier with national option) it's dramatically cheaper and has much better outcomes [1]. Reality doesn't line up with your pre-conceived notions. [1] https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Health-at-a-Glance-2017-Ke...
What do the obesity rates look like in those countries? You cannot compare a country like Sweden or Finland to the United States when they have completely dissimilar obesity rates, the main driving force behind healthcare costs. A close example to a region with high obesity rates would be the UK and the obesity epidemic has been straining the NHS for years: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/04/obesity-putt…
Y’all better be hella fat if that’s the justification you’re using.
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> Doctor's are paid too much... why? You can also branch off here: because malpractice insurance is insanely expensive. Why? Because people sue over absolutely everything. Why? Because lawyers in this country are vultures. If anything is overly expensive, you can usually track it back to insurance costs somewhere, which can typically be tracked back to the fact that we live in a litigious society.
they sue and get awarded insane damages, which is probably something that could be regulated more strictly, but then what do i know.
For example, take this recent news story and pretend this was in the USA, where a woman goes in for a routine procedure and ends up with an abortion.
https://nypost.com/2019/09/24/doctor-performed-abortion-on-w...
How would you like to strictly regulate damages for that? What do you think is reasonable for that situation? How about if someone is rendered disabled or impaired? Marred? Dead?
The entire health insurance industry makes ~$25B in profits a year, correct? That doesn't seem overly large considering it is the entire insurance industry.
It’s not only profit. They also cause a lot of administrative overhead. For example if doctors had to deal only with one insurer or at least one coding system they wouldn’t need four billing assistants as I have seen. In essence insurance companies do a lot of unnecessary stuff. Their profit is only a small part of that cost.
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's free.
We’re just gonna pretend Europe, Australia, Japan, Canada etc. don’t exist?
The problem is that there is not a single reason that healthcare is so expensive. Even if you list the top 15 reasons, you still have to apply the "5 whys" to each of them to find root causes and possible solutions. - Doctor's are paid too much... why? - Well they need to be paid a lot because medical school debt is 250k or more... why? - Medical schools/the AMA are artificially limiting the number of students and re…
> One thing that will not make healthcare less expensive is "Medicare For All". It will just shift the bill to different people. Now, you can argue it's the morally correct course of action, or those people who will be forced to foot the bill (upper middle class taxpayers) are more capable of doing so, but you cannot credibly claim with a straight face that it will make anything cheaper. In fact, the opposite will oc…
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Time to change that! :)
No doubt. The tough questions are around where will the sacrifices be made?
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Doesn’t the fact that vastly different systems perform better than the US possibly suggest that our problem is something other than the payor model? What is the theoretical reason why US costs would be higher than Switzerland? Premiums for private insurance should be much lower in the US, given that Medicare takes high cost people out of the private pool.
The difference between Switzerland and the US is that in Switzerland pricing is regulated. The free market does not work when your life is at stake. You can shop around as much as you like for a butt enlargement and skip it if it's too expensive, but if you find a bat in the bedroom you need a physician straightaway, and then he will overcharge you.
Once you're in desperate need (say, when it's bad enough that you're calling an ambulance), or unconscious, it's not realistic to suggest price-shopping.
Markets of the mostly-free sort work well enough for commodity products, like the kind of peanut butter you're buying a jar of every few weeks (though even that's regulated, from things to food safety to nutrition labeling); for everything else, government's a fabulous tool to make sure people aren't taken advantage of, whether it's through heavy regulation (e.g. Switzerland, as someone mentioned) or offering the service itself (e.g. UK).