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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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I hope his view isn’t so myopic/“boot straps” but I guess it’s possible.

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

#162
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you think it costs to maintain all these negotiated contracts VS just having a single payer system with the same price for all procedures?

It's very expensive, carriers have an economic incentive to simplify it and this is still where they end up. There are a long tail of provider circumstances that the single-payer model will need to figure out. Some examples: * Small hospitals in low-density, underserved areas have to make up for underutilized equipment and personnel costs. They raise prices on unrelated, common procedures to break even (This is very…

>>* CMS (medicare/medicaid) sets a low price for a procedure that's overly common in a particular facility, now that facility loses money for each occurrence. They choose other procedures to raise the price to try to break even.

This is precisely why most Doctors I speak with are abhorrently against a single payer system.

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

#163

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…

Just a nitpick, when there is a single purchaser it's called a monopsony.

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

#164

My current assumption is that private healthcare/insurance is to blame, because countries without that or with less generally have better outcomes at less cost. Looking for evidence to the contrary

Argentina has public free healthcare and it still has growing expenditures in the private health sector.

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

#165

Someone with the right connections should call up Google Cloud and ask them to ingest the data into BigQuery as an example dataset like the NY taxi trips. It would be a great way for them to show off the capabilities of the engine and helpful for everyone wanting to do analysis on it. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data

ProviDRs Care network is hosted in Google Drive. All 200gb compressed. The article writer has probably never heard of this network.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zmNEPoVCa0kIVBIu2hu7...

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

#166

My current assumption is that private healthcare/insurance is to blame, because countries without that or with less generally have better outcomes at less cost. Looking for evidence to the contrary

> countries without that or with less generally have better outcomes at less cost.

> Looking for evidence to the contrary

There was no evidence behind your claim either. 90% of US healthcare costs go to managing ( not treating ) obesity/metabolic disease . Yes 90% [1].

Which country with similar metabolic disease rate has better outcomes with less costs?

1. https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/about/costs/index.htm

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

#168

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"

Keep in mind these files are called "Machine Readable" for a reason. Yes, they dumped everything. Machines and 3rd parties are supposed to sort it out. Best be assured each carrier now has full visibility of each other leading to "transparency".

It might be a little exciting to be an underwriter right now :D

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

#169
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider the amount that the US spends per capita on healthcare relative to other countries for the same standard of care a "failure" of the healthcare industry? Or is there some other reason healthcare "just costs more" here? Also wondering what you think a solution is - single-payer for better and simpler price negotiations, or some other approach? My main concern is if we're spending 20% of GDP on something…

Healthcare is such a base layer of the economy, I find comparisons to be extraordinaly difficult between countries. On the most basic level our pathway to becoming a healthcare provider of all sorts is dramatically more expensive and limited than other countries, what healthcare providers are paid is dramatically more than other countries, we invest many times per capita what other countries put into basic medical re…

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