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Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

nytimes.com

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Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#391

Post by namdnay »

baryphonic wrote: post #377
namdnay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should we have single-payer markets for auto repairs, then? Or how about toilet paper, especially in a pandemic? Both of those are very inelastic, yet socialism has a particularly poor record of producing either reliably. Why do you segue from single-payer to “socialism”? Btw not sure about the states, but here in Europe, Single-payer works fine for auto repair, it’s exactly what happens when your car breaks down d…

State control of the means of production is a common (though not unique) definition of socialism, is it not?

I think that would be more a definition of communism than socialism?

But single-payer (and not single-provider) is not state control of the means of production. The means of "production" remain private, it's just that everyone is covered by basic state insurance.

Honestly, having lived and worked in several single-payer countries, it works really well - I'd even say that it works better than pure state-run systems like the UK

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#392

Post by conanbatt »

kristopolous wrote: post #390
conanbatt wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In practice, "free market" as a historically implemented policy has meant "remove all oversight and revoke any protections or governing laws and thus legalize all business practices (such as scams, collusion, price fixing, market manipulations) regardless of ethics and hand the legislative pen to the business leaders to write their own laws. The rule of law is important for free markets and breach of contracts need…

Historically, those who legislate and wield power have not invoked it in that way. That's the point. "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin. "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts. I only care about the actual, real world material reality that has historically factually happened. The champions politic in a way that tends strong…

> "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin

Or regulation is taking things from the garbage bin and make them into law.

> "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts.

If tax dollars are being stolen, it is the government that is doing both the tax collection and allowing the tax plundering.

> For instance the sanctity of contract matters when it's with the gas pipeline company but not when it's with the american tribes

What you really want is more free markets: that is, more rule of law, law that can be applied systematically and with no discretion and discrimination. You mention the enemy over and over: the coerced state that does terrible biddings. But you then exempt government as if it were innocent first and corrupted later.

It is the mechanism by which you decide on economic matters by power that produces the vast majority of the issues you mention, way above the famous "market failures" and unaccounted externalities.

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#393

Post by conanbatt »

three14 wrote: post #389
conanbatt wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't the pay-up-or die model apply to food or shelter?

If you found yourself in a situation where getting food or shelter now was a matter of life and death, and you effectively had only one supplier, it would. But you usually have time to find alternatives, and usually can skip the shelter altogether, and the markets are so large that it's usually hard for a supplier to form a monopoly or a few to form oligopoly. On top of that, even "pay-up-or-die" doesn't mean that th…

So you think that farmers sell corn at the prices because they fear they will get robbed or plundered otherwise, but hospitals fear no plunder?

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#394

Post by kristopolous »

conanbatt wrote: post #392
kristopolous wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, those who legislate and wield power have not invoked it in that way. That's the point. "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin. "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts. I only care about the actual, real world material reality that has historically factually happened. The champions politic in a way that tends strong…

> "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin Or regulation is taking things from the garbage bin and make them into law. > "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts. If tax dollars are being stolen, it is the government that is doing both the tax collection and allowing the tax plundering. > For instance the sanctity of contract matte…

Every business offense I mentioned is orchestrated through government. As a tool of exploitation and enforcement, they're utterly inseparable. Concentrating the gain + spreading the cost requires both.

Capital and governance (CG) have been the internal organs of the body politic forever.

Hacker news, facebook, an elementary school, every institution is CG.

The theoretical framework of free markets requires the fiction that they are somehow separate and independent!

It's imaginary rubbish.

Corporations were started by the crown and modern political empires grew because of their corporate needs.

They expanded together. Every. Single. Time. Always.

The free marketeers think they can ignore all history and merely, through zero evidence intellectual exercise, derive absolute truth that needs no confirmation, measurement or testing because by logical deduction alone they know The Truth.

They use rubbish homo economicus behavioral models, rubbish ideas of clean governance and capital separation, and the rubbish assumption that companies win by playing by the rules instead of the reality where they find a new exploit.

That's why it's a scam. It's based on a classic scapegoating shell game and then uses classic cult systems to ignore evidence or question a priori assumptions.

It's the same internal logic as astrology and horoscopes. Complicated models, no reality check, cherry picked evidence, projected interpretations, same thing.

Total nonsense. It belongs in the spirituality section

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#395

Post by three14 »

conanbatt wrote: post #393
three14 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you found yourself in a situation where getting food or shelter now was a matter of life and death, and you effectively had only one supplier, it would. But you usually have time to find alternatives, and usually can skip the shelter altogether, and the markets are so large that it's usually hard for a supplier to form a monopoly or a few to form oligopoly. On top of that, even "pay-up-or-die" doesn't mean that th…

So you think that farmers sell corn at the prices because they fear they will get robbed or plundered otherwise, but hospitals fear no plunder?

No. I think I covered that with "the markets are so large that it's usually hard for a supplier to form a monopoly or a few to form oligopoly."

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#396

Post by nottorp »

guitarbill wrote: post #335
wil421 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hidden service fees. Taxing is not so simple in the US. My county has a lower sales tax rate than other counties around me. When I worked as a waiter the municipality had a special tax on alcohol in addition to the county and states alcohol and regular sales taxes.

> Taxing is not so simple in the US Isn't this an argument for including taxes final prices, so people don't have to keep track of this? Maybe you're travelling. And it isn't like businesses don't already have to keep track of it for the bill. But instead of requiring businesses to print accurate menus or price labels, the burden is put on the customer to have this detailed knowledge, no matter where they go? I guess…

Psychologically, if they quote to you the price without taxes, it looks cheaper even if you know about the extra 20% in sales tax and service fees and city tax and and...

Someone showed me the bill from some street corner food vendor in SF. It had like 4 taxes on it over the advertised price.

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#397

Post by bpt3 »

vkou wrote: post #217
phkahler wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If there was ala-carte transparent pricing and no insurer lockouts things may be a bit better. Posted prices, and provider always charges that price weather its paid by insurance or not. Then insurance companies can compete on how much they cover at what premiums.

That leaves too much patient money on the table, and will lead to patients doing comparison shopping, which is not something the healthcare industry wants.

You've described every service provider on Earth, and that's not a justification for them to avoid transparency in pricing or billing.

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#398

Post by 8note »

winston_smith wrote: post #290
arcticbull wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every medical insurance claim denied in bad faith is an assault if it leads to delay in care, and if it leads to death, is a murder. I suspect if you take that lens, you will see that the government insurance is not the violent one here. 45,000 people die each year in the US without care. Ending that would go a long way to reducing government violence. [1] [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-…

And if you define paper cuts as murder, then libraries are the real killers. Do you really want to put your insurance paperwork on the same level as innocents getting bombed?

Who's dying of paper cuts? It's easy to see who's dying of denied insurance

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#399

Post by 8note »

unishark wrote: post #317
arcticbull wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the cancer one, possibly. Do go on. Why is dying due to an explicit action any more of a free choice than dying of an explicit inaction? Why is one any more coercive than the other? The only point I'm making is that healthcare is not a free market due to lack of voluntary agreement between buyer and seller. Once you accept that it's not a big jump to say the system should be remediated.

> Do go on. Why is dying due to an explicit action any more of a free choice than dying of an explicit inaction? Because one is coercion and the other is simply an economic system. Which by the way is also used for all the other necessities of life too. How about food? The whole point of a free market is competition, so if you were at least arguing for emergency situations there's be something to talk about since it'…

Coercion is simply an economic system too?

I tell you to do work, and if you don't I shoot you. It's just economics; I'm trading not shooting you for your labour and everyone comes out happy

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#400

Post by 8note »

whiddershins wrote: post #241
akiselev wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's basically no example of a monopoly forming outside of government regulation. That's tautological statement. There is no free market without private property protections which do not exist outside of government regulation either.

Some people view the protection of individual intrinsic rights (freedom from violence, protection of property, the right to move freely about) as a separate thing from regulation. Government protecting people's rights, vs. government protecting people, or government prohibiting consensual business dealings.

So I can just claim that none of the things that cause monopolies are regulation, then regulations don't cause monopolies?
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