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Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

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Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#141

Post by a-user-you-like »

medlazik wrote: post #128
gwright wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare in the US is definitely not driven by the free market. It is probably one of the most regulated industries. Whatever disfunction you want to call out in US healthcare it is going to be difficult to pin that on the free market.

Free market? Capitalism. I know we're on HN but, say the word? Capitalists take a cut. Shareholders of big pharma, insurance companies and hospitals are why healthcare in the US is expensive. Public sector not being monopolistic is why healthcare in the US is expensive. In France, social security reimburses about 70% of most costs. Cheap private insurance reimburses the rest. About 75% of public hospitals and not for…

Non free market? Communism. I know we’re on HN but, say the word?

Of course the US market is highly regulated and so the market is not free to lower prices. Of course the AMA is a racket. Of course needs of certificate are abhorrent.

Given the customer non—coerced access to his preferred provider, and not taking his money and slapping a bunch of regulations on him will of course lower prices and give him better care.

I don’t see why the other side can’t see it.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#142

Post by jjulius »

1MachineElf wrote: post #133
vxNsr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely a poor ai attempt.

From the user's "about" section: Perhaps you'll think my comments are unthinkable. My only response to that is that they were legibly written, not by a machine, but by a writer with a soul.

Yeah, it's unclear to me. A lot of the more personal things that are mentioned throughout the account's posts seem to match up with some of the quickly-googleable details that can be found just via their username. I suppose that it could be baked into the AI, but... /shrug

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#143

Post by spaetzleesser »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #6

Anyone else get the feeling this is malicious compliance on behalf of the insurance companies? "Oh, they're going to force us to publish our prices are they? Well we'll publish so much data it'll take a herculean effort to make it readable to anyone that doesn't work in data engineering"

They may have that thought but crunching large amounts of data is not exactly hard these days. Better too much than too little data.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#144

Post by QuarterReptile »

skybrian wrote: post #138
anonymouse008 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Healthcare is such a base layer of the economy Academically this sounds enlightening, but it only takes one cursory walk around a supermarket in the US to see this is unequivocally false. Healthcare is an externality, not a base of anything. From the average customer to the product in the aisle to the marketing - everything is 100% not a direct cost benefit function in terms of healthcare.

I'm not sure what that proves, given that you went to a grocery store instead of a pharmacy.

I'm guessing parent was saying that most medical spending is payback for terrible US American eating habits?

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#145

Post by spaetzleesser »

dj_gitmo wrote: post #60
sl-dolt wrote: post #32

I'm the author. A question I have is: how did so many prices ever get negotiated in the first place? What kind of systems are in place to do this kind of micro-negotiation?

The US healthcare system is wildly complicated and inefficient because it is a double-bureaucracy; pubic and private. The government bureaucracy makes a bunch of rules and also provide healthcare through Medicare/Medicaid. The private bureaucracy compete with each other, and hospitals, and pharma companies, ect. Many of the private health providers are for-profit and lobby against rule changes that would reduce compl…

"usually it's because it makes someone money and they'll fight hard to keep it that way"

And it's not just some money but very BIG money they make.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#146

Post by flowersjeff »

From my understanding though, these 'prices' are outdated nearly as quickly as they are published. I.e. sure you have a set, but everything is dynamic and changing. Seems like it would require a ML approach to 'understand' such a dataset going forward.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#147

Post by spaetzleesser »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #39
planetsprite wrote: post #9

I wonder what percentage of work in the US healthcare system is completely unnecessary from a general perspective but made necessary deliberately to justify the unethical system that allows millions to die unnecessarily.

> to justify the unethical system that allows millions to die unnecessarily Which people are those millions? The system saves millions of lives that would have died in generations past. How do you factor that into your claim?

There are lot of people who don't go to a doctor when they should. Even taking an ambulance after an accident is a gamble a lot of people can't afford.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#148

Post by MichaelZuo »

6000 hospitals x say around 10000 priced items, on average, per hospital x 100 different negotiated pricing formulas = 6 trillion unique prices.

Of course many hospitals negotiate en bloc as part of a healthcare network, and there probably are more than 100 different organizations that negotiated unique healthcare pricing but the ballpark number seems to make sense.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#149

Post by xtracto »

nimbius wrote: post #117

this disclosure was spurned by recent federal legislation that required it. Im a full cynic on the disclosure, so be warned. - these prices, as negotiated between insurers and providers, were already well known inside the industry. so much so that many procedures could be declined coverage well in advance of a customer ever needing one. this insider knowledge formed the core of many earnings reports for insurers and…

For profit Health insurance is a scam.

It´s like if you signed a contract to pay Netflix a monthly fee to eventually watch a movie, and for some reason Netflix profit would be based on you watching as little as possible. They would do all in their power to minimize the amount of content you could really watch. Unaligned objectives. And the problem is that unlike Netflix, Health Insurance (at least in the USA) is inelastic: You MUST pay for it.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#150

Post by atourgates »

jamestimmins wrote: post #28
sl-dolt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figuring out the size of this data was part of the research phase for doing just that: building out that database. I'm curious to know if other people are already working on it (maybe Turquoise Health?)

Very cool. Who do you see as the likely users of that database? Is it primarily for researchers/data journalists, or is there a commercial value to it? I'd be very curious to read more about the data cleaning phase when you get there. Specifically, how hard it is to combine this data and construct good schemas.

As someone who's worked on the provider side in different capacities, I can tell you that there could be tremendous value on the provider side.

It's entirely possible that two surgeons with offices next to each other could be getting reimbursed at wildly different rates for their most common procedures for their most common procedures by the same provider.

If you're that provider, you ABSOLUTELY want to know what the surgeon next door is getting paid the next time your group is negotiating with the insurance provider.

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