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How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

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Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this backfire - similarly to how publicly traded companies' CEOs disclosing their pay caused their pay to skyrocket?

Can you support that claim? I couldn't find when CEO pay went public but it sounds very likely like one of those causes were correlation definitely doesn't imply causation.

All CEO pay for public companies is exposed in the 10Ks.

What I suspect the person was referring to is the change where compensation became more tied to equity valuation.

Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#132
post #16

Wait till you find out how much it actually costs doctors/providers to render some of these services! Do you like 90% margins? Doctors sure do! :)

Doctors and Surgeons in America are incredibly highly paid. People love hating insurance and drug companies but the cost of people is driving much of the price.

Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#133
post #85
post #30

Next step is pharmacies. Find out which step in the chain is overpricing. The manufacturers, PBMs or local pharmacies, etc.

I think we all already know it's all of them.

I've been reading about healthcare systems off and on, sometimes fairly seriously, for over 15 years, and my conclusion about the entire US system is that "the problem" is "literally everyone involved".

It's why various schemes that target one thing (say, excessively-expensive doctor liability insurance, which gets talked up as some super-big deal and a huge part of the problem in certain circles) are typically expected, on sober analysis, to have only a tiny effect on prices—everyone is taking too much money, at every level, so at most steps the % increase over what's reasonable isn't huge, but by the time you filter through a few layers of that with everyone piling atop the other layers, sure enough, it's a solid 30%-40% more expensive than it has any reason to be. But there's no one, or two, or even three things you can point at and say "if we fix this, we fix almost the entire problem". Every part of it needs a shake-up. It's like 20 different, though interrelated, problems, contributing to the bad result we see. Addressing most or all of the problem will take tens of measures, or else one big, sweeping, fundamental overhaul (M4A or what have you)

Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#134
This will be huge! I’ve found that self paying can be 1/nth the cost of paying through my insurance. But you need to request self pay up front.

Being able to better understand prices before hand will drastically help people reduce their healthcare costs.

Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#135
post #16

Wait till you find out how much it actually costs doctors/providers to render some of these services! Do you like 90% margins? Doctors sure do! :)

As the spouse of a doctor, this made me giggle. If her practice had 90% margins, my life would be a lot different than it is. Her actual net margin, as in what she brings home after paying all the bills, is closer to 15%.

A private practice owned by the MDs reporting relatively low net margins is meaningless without knowing what the MDs are taking out as income.

Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#136
This would be great news in a world where healthcare company revenue (which never quite trickles all the way down to retail shareholders) wasn’t just a one-way wratchet.

More opaque: costs more. More transparent: costs more.

Want a better deal? Choose better parents pleb.

Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#137
post #8

This is regulation everybody should be able to get behind. How are these markets supposed to function efficiently with healthy competition if critical information like this is hidden away?

The free market produces the most efficient outcome

Sadly, no. Or it does, but only if one defines "efficiency" tautologically as "what a free market would do", which is sadly too common. There are many factors that contribute to inefficient markets, one of which is information asymmetry among the participants. Keeping markets efficient takes work, and, indeed, sometimes requires regulation.

Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#138
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you support that claim? I couldn't find when CEO pay went public but it sounds very likely like one of those causes were correlation definitely doesn't imply causation.

All CEO pay for public companies is exposed in the 10Ks. What I suspect the person was referring to is the change where compensation became more tied to equity valuation.

CEO pay wasn't always public and the compensation is only mostly equity because it has a tax advantage [1].

[1]: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-bo...

Re: How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this backfire - similarly to how publicly traded companies' CEOs disclosing their pay caused their pay to skyrocket?

Can you support that claim? I couldn't find when CEO pay went public but it sounds very likely like one of those causes were correlation definitely doesn't imply causation.

This[1] Wikipedia article talks about it some, and links to this[2] paper.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_th...

[2]https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.2202/1535-167X.120...

Edit: adding an additional paper on the topic https://www.princeton.edu/~amas/papers/CEODisclosureMandate....

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