I started a healthcare cost transparency platform in 2014 [1] and struggled to find costs by CPT code. The best we had was medicare reimbursement rates, which were hardly a good litmus for out of pocket costs. It's nice that after 8 years, things are finally shifting. Just shows how important timing is in entrepreneurship.
Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
221–230 of 549 posts
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
That 90% number is plain not true. Please cite any source for that. The costs for obese folk are on average 90%-100% higher than for non-obese folk, but that's not 90% of total spending. (See e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33470881/ ) Total cost approaches 20% of spending: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...
Don’t get so hung up on precise numbers. We all know Americans are obese and that greatly adds to healthcare costs. I can’t imagine any downside of trying to prioritize lowering obesity.
"Don't get so hung up on precise numbers", uh, 90% isn't just imprecise, it's so catastrophically wrong that it undermines your entire argument
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's a confusopoly! They're most obvious with "basic" products like energy and comms - in theory what is delivered is mostly undifferentiated kWh or GB but through the magic of "confusing plans", marketers have succeeded in making comparisons very difficult for regular people. (You can do it, but you need OCD, a year of billing data and a spreadsheet - which greatly exceeds the cognitive effort most people will inves…
Huh? I look on a comparison website for price per kWh.
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are rarely satisfied with this answer but its demonstrably true and was proven time and time again at the facilities ClearHealth managed. 1) Feverent, almost religious, adherence to hand washing. 2) No neck ties or dangly sleves whatsoever in buildings that house patients. 3) Change from stainless steel hardware for doors and travel touch surfaces back to "brass/copper". Those are simple, virtually free, thing…
What about the incentive for non profit hospitals to grow so that they can better compensate leadership, resulting in capital that must be spent on facilities and equipment to retain non profit status. Leading to a spiral? It is hard to compare details of the systems and outcomes across countries, but surely we can find where the money apent ends up? Construction firms? Doctors? Equipment manufacturers? Hospital admi…
Is there a rule that says a certain percentage of revenue must be spent on a facility to retain non-profit status? It can be spent on equipment and salaries, both of which would benefit much more than upgrading the building to no patient care benefit.
This is anecdotal but the number one complaint I've heard from physicians about patient care is facilities being run and and managed by non-clinical MPH/MHA "business types" whose primary focus is almost invariably cutting costs, increasing physician workloads, and fighting salary increases tooth and nail.
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#225This is unacceptable. Perhaps it meets the letter of the law, but certainly not the spirit. This doesn't begin to make healthcare anything like a "free market". It's dishonest in the same way a restaurant might be forced to release a nutritional analysis of their food, and so they release a molecule-by-molecule description. Despicable.
You assume that they’re being intentionally nebulous but in actuality it really is that complicated.
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#226I work in data at https://www.carrumhealth.com/ , and I've been parsing this data for weeks. The transparency prices allow us to meaningfully negotiate with providers, and make tangible, incremental progress toward cheaper health care. Providers and existing insurance carriers leverage information asymmetry to control the market otherwise. For context, we bundle the 100's of itemized costs into a single, static bill…
Sounds like an application for ML, to determine which codes frequently coincide per-patient at each provider and then assign those groupings to cross-provider "Treatment XYZ" buckets to enable apples-to-apples comparisons.
I would think a basic statistical analysis should suffice.
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
csv is many times over again a simpler format than sqlite and easier to understand by anyone across the world. Never heard of ndjson, can’t see one publishing this data in a format that isn’t nearly as common as something like csv (or regular json which some of the data is published in).
CSV only seems simple. Lots of parsing edge cases. Sqlite isn't readable by hand but it's basically bulletproof. NDJSON is literally just newline seperated JSON, it's just easier to process as a stream without a special parser.
Sure, could be simpler, but there's a spec and multiple implementations: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180.html
And the spec is ~5 pages.
Not sure why NDJSON is considered simpler, as json objects can be arbitrarily nested. Breaking into records is easier, but parsing is harder.
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#228Earlier 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…
> 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? That we spend more per capita for approximately the same level of care as most other first world countries is certainly annoying. But sometimes I think we are too focused on that and not putting enough effort into trying to stop the cost from increa…
Data doesn’t make sense. If US costs went up similar to other countries but US is significantly more expensive than other countries today, does it mean costs in US have always been much higher?
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#229FYI, if you want to view the data in a reasonable format replace ~ with comma, but first make sure to replace any commas with something like a semicolon. I guess csv delimiters can be anything and they chose ~! Good thing there are no insurance company names with a ~ in it.
Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
#230No post body was provided.