161–170 of 370 posts
Very soon we'll have Congressional hearings after oil companies see profits climb 7000 percent over last year, and they'll look sad and do nothing. I expect much the same from health insurance companies.
I'm one of the co-founders of Turquoise Health, mentioned in the article here. We've been downloading and parsing this data all day. It's a really big deal in the industry that the prices that insurance companies pay doctors are now being shared publicly. It will have all sorts of positive impacts over time, hopefully making rate negotiations more consistent and fair between different insurance plans. Right now, 10x…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "not starting any new wars" can be perceived as bowing to foreign nations This is an interesting take on peace in the middle east.
Hey, I agree with you there, but my point is that any aspect of politics can (and will) be reframed by both sides to support their preconceived beliefs. I've edited my comment to speak in a more neutral political tone.
I'm curious if this is a first step towards hospitals being required to charge the same prices to everyone, insured or otherwise.
I'm one of the co-founders of Turquoise Health, mentioned in the article here. We've been downloading and parsing this data all day. It's a really big deal in the industry that the prices that insurance companies pay doctors are now being shared publicly. It will have all sorts of positive impacts over time, hopefully making rate negotiations more consistent and fair between different insurance plans. Right now, 10x…
We really need to move to reference based pricing. We can cut so much waste out of the current system including brokers. Reference based pricing also get rids of the loopholes for things like anesthesiologists being "out of network" at a hospital/facility that is "in network". It also gets rid of the situation where if you offer cash you get one price but if you submit for the same code, it could be 3x or 10x or even…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, I agree with you there, but my point is that any aspect of politics can (and will) be reframed by both sides to support their preconceived beliefs. I've edited my comment to speak in a more neutral political tone.
The "both sides" idea is an illusion, the two sides disagree on everything but on one very important point there is no disagreement...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Cheap energy" is not the boon you think it is. You have to consider other factors - deregulating the food industry and getting rid of the FDA would save millions of taxpayer's money, would lower prices of the supply chain and let consumers pay significantly less for food, yet would have drastic side effects. Cheap energy that requires deregulation, more alarming and precarious climate effects, etc might not be a net…
Thank you for saying so. Flooding the market with cheap, low-quality crude would drop the price of gasoline, but it'd be horrid for the environment.
In the West everything is a scam. Our health system is a scam, the military industrial complex is a scam, our education system is a scam, our currency is a scam, our media is a scam, the president is a scam. What makes you think that ANYTHING going on in the West ISN'T a scam?
Anecdote: I recently had my yearly glasses update. Cost was $188 to me + $20 of insurance copay, so the glasses provider charged $208 for the glasses. That's not too bad, so I asked how much it would be to replace/update the lenses on my old frames, entirely at my charge. It would've been $450. Just for the lenses. I passed. I find it scandalous how much they can charge when just before they were perfectly happy to a…
They likely had lenses already available for the frames they had in stock, or were frequently making batches of them. OTOH the frames you already owned may be out of style, so they would have needed to grind a totally custom pair of lenses, just for you.
My brother in law owned a lens cutting shop and they have boxes filled with lenses ground to all sorts of prescriptions that are circular plugs 3 or 4 inches in diameter. When the order comes in they use the pupil measurements and the frames to cut the lenses for the prescription down to fit into the frame.
I don't know how well I explained that but you can watch this video to see exactly how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCjGNUPO0WU
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
Almost all real markets deviate from those requirements. Sometimes these deviations aren't enough to prevent the market from producing close to maximally efficient outcomes, and sometimes they are enough to make the market produce outcomes nowhere efficient.
This is one of the reasons why an economics degree requires coursework beyond Economics 101. :-) Economics 101 is the equivalent of Physics 101 where we mostly ignore things like air resistance and friction or Electronics 101 where we ignore things like parasitic capacitance and parasitic inductance of component leads and keep frequencies low and time scales long enough that we don't have to worry about speed of light delays between different sides of our circuits.
It's the courses after the 101 courses were you start to get messiness that is the real world of economics or physics or electronics.
Anyway, when a real world free market deviates from the requirements to produce a maximally efficient output one of the ways to make it work better is to use regulation to try to make it behave as if the missing requirement held.
A good example is when you have a good that costs the maker a significant amount to make but that anyone can easily copy perfectly at close to zero cost. A free market will tend to not be efficient for that good because makers have trouble making a profit (or even staying in business). Consumers pay near zero for their copies and so can consume as much as they want, which makes them happy, but there will be much less variety available than consumers want.
A long time ago the approach to that was to just not have a market for that kind of good. Makers would find some rich patron who was willing to pay to have new goods made. Free copies might still be made for the masses, but the rich patrons gained social status among their peers by being patrons of famous makers so would keep patronizing makers.
A regulatory fix is to make it so only the maker is allowed to make copies of their goods. You can then have a decent market in those goods. It's still not ideal because although it solves the problem of the market getting makers to make it does raise the price to consumers above the theoretical free market price which should be near zero.
Another approach would be to have the government pay the makers, and then let anyone freely make copies. This is probably the way to get closest to maximal efficiency but it raises the problem of how to have the government decide with makers to support. One approach to that is to try to track which things consumers are actually using, and then pay the makers proportionally to that usage.
Another issue with that approach is where should the money for the makers come from? It could come from general government revenues but then you have the problem of deciding how much should be used for this. Also you will have people who don't like these kind of goods and object to their tax dollars going to support them. Another approach is to tax use of these goods to fund the makers, or tax something that correlates well with use of the goods.
Let's not overlook that an approach that requires tracking of consumer use might require surveillance that, in the hands of someone who wants to do something less benign than just figure out how to allocate maker pay, could be used for evil purposes. That might be too high a price to pay just to get the most efficient levels of production and consumption of this particular good.
Real economics is complicated and messy.