What a strange concept, "hospital price".
I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
11–20 of 403 posts
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#12Toothless law. What article writer should do is just shame the hospitals who don't comply. Tweet at them and make it known.
It really is a toothless law, the hospital probably makes more surplus profit from price discrimination in a single week than their entire fine for the year. The damages should be increased 100x.
In my fantasy world there's a full-on constitutional amendment demanding that any monetary fine must meet or esceed the profits gained by breaking the law.
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#13When High Deductible Insurance was introduced the supposed concept was to "give employees a stake in their costs, and therefore lower them for both employer and employee."
However, even today doing so is very challenging, and before laws like this it was essentially impossible. There's no way to shop around American healthcare, with the system itself working against you at every turn (e.g. doctors prescribing named brand, and you not be allowed to switch back to generic without another $100+ appointment).
You can try calling and getting quotes, but they'll just waste a bunch of time and then give you a RANGE with no assurances. Even getting the quote requires your doctor to write up the entire work-order, which itself can get pushback, and or cost money.
Then you have random things like for-profit life flights, which are automatic bankruptcy machines. Imagine one minute driving down the road, then suddenly waking up in a hospital, and then getting billed $80K for just the trip to get there let alone your hospital treatment or recovery. And insurance doesn't cover it.
Aside but all ambulances around me are "out of network" and don't work with insurance at all. So I guess I should shop around by moving cities..?
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#14What a strange concept, "hospital price".
There’s always a price, you just may not pay directly.
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#15When High Deductible Insurance was introduced the supposed concept was to "give employees a stake in their costs, and therefore lower them for both employer and employee." However, even today doing so is very challenging, and before laws like this it was essentially impossible. There's no way to shop around American healthcare, with the system itself working against you at every turn (e.g. doctors prescribing named b…
I believe some states regulate that better than others. At the least, some prevent 'surprise bills' where the provider selected is out of network while the referer is in network. That's just not fair when you're unconscious or suffering.
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#16Love the post, however, your description of the problem leaves me wondering...did we work together?
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#17Toothless law. What article writer should do is just shame the hospitals who don't comply. Tweet at them and make it known.
What's more toothless than tweeting? Words don't hurt the pocketbooks all that much, especially of hospital groups.
A NYT article about the hospital I'm not even certain does very much.
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#18Toothless law. What article writer should do is just shame the hospitals who don't comply. Tweet at them and make it known.
It really is a toothless law, the hospital probably makes more surplus profit from price discrimination in a single week than their entire fine for the year. The damages should be increased 100x.
I would advocate a more direct form of damages: a hospital that does not comply may not charge more than the minimum over all hospitals in a 500 mile radius for any procedure. A hospital that does charge more and is caught must refund double the difference. Furthermore, no contractual provision may penalize patients for attempting to seek that double refund, and a class action lawsuit to recover the difference that actually goes to trial recovers triple instead.
Hospitals will comply immediately :)
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#19Interesting to read that only 33%-50% of hospitals comply with the law and post their prices. If there's one thing this country needs to do it's demand transparency everywhere. Especially our government. Spending. Salaries. It all needs to be public.
> Especially our government. Spending. Salaries. It all needs to be public. This is especially useful for valuable gov't employees that want to negotiate a higher salary :) Totally fine by me, but just be aware you may not realize the second order effects. The primary people that care may actually just be the employees for pay fairness
The US government is the last entity that should be playing games with salary negotiations. The G payment schedules are well established and can be updated. If they need to figure out other ways of providing a salary, they can update the existing schedules or make a new set that is also publicly available. If I’m paying taxes to provide a salary for a federal employee, I want that to be recorded, publicly accessible, and for there to be a controller somewhere accountable for how they money is allocated.
Re: I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
#20Interesting to read that only 33%-50% of hospitals comply with the law and post their prices. If there's one thing this country needs to do it's demand transparency everywhere. Especially our government. Spending. Salaries. It all needs to be public.
> Especially our government. Spending. Salaries. It all needs to be public. A lot of it is. In California for example you can go look up any public employee's compensation at https://transparentcalifornia.com/