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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

#251

Post by mvc »

notch656a wrote: post #206
nradov wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we apply the same sort of "stupid X law" to people who drink alcohol or drive motorcycles or play rugby? This is one of the moral hazards of a socialized medical system. When the rest of society is paying for your medical care it becomes tempting to save money be dictating exactly how you're allowed to live your life. Obesity is a serious public health problem but we won't fix it by calling people stupid or ch…

>Should we apply the same sort of "stupid X law" to people who drink alcohol or drive motorcycles or play rugby? Yes, precisely. Keep chopping down at these factors until all that's practically left is private healthcare -- that's a feature not a bug. It's enough that I have to pay the bill to scrape the blood off the street when a motorcycle is crashed, not interested in paying someone elses motorcycle related healt…

Sure. As long as we tighten up on other externalities.

You use a lot of energy? You pay for the damage to the world.

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

#252

Post by themaninthedark »

snuxoll wrote: post #137
BitwiseFool wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"3) Change from stainless steel hardware for doors and travel touch surfaces back to "brass/copper". Because of the pandemic I started encountering doors that have a shoe pull, where you can use your foot to open the door instead of having to touch the handle. I really hope these catch on, but they are still quite rare.

Also stop getting rid of paper towels if you still have manual faucets. Nothing grosses me out more than going to a public restroom with only air dryers, but manually operated faucets that now require you use clean hands to turn off after you turned them on with presumably dirty hands.

Use your elbow to turn off the faucet(as long as it is lever type, if twist type then good luck).

I want paper towels for the door knobs/pulls and the trash can should be located near the door so I can throw it out after opening the door.

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

#253

Post by chii »

seaourfreed wrote: post #246

USA Healthcare is 19.5% of GDP. Canada + Australia + UK + (a few similar countries) average 10.5% of GDP. The USA healthcare price gouges via run away prices. Healthcare corporations corrupting congress is the fuel that forces this on people (and breaks a free market).

But looking from another perspective - if healthcare is 20% of GDP, an awful amount of people are therefore paid directly due to this "waste".

Any improvement in efficiency would mean those people lose out on jobs. A new use for them must be found, or there will be massive unemployment (at least, short-medium term).

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

#254

Post by imapeopleperson »

GendingMachine wrote: post #222
imapeopleperson wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a topic that’s always going to have wildly different numbers. Who cares? It doesn’t change what we all know to be true. Nothing has been undermined whatsoever

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

#255

Post by kev33 »

pc86 wrote: post #220
kev33 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

There's no reason to come on here and be nasty to someone you've never met because you or some relative of yours had a bad experience. If it's that big of a deal for you, work to fix it and you can come on here with your credentials and blah blah instead of whining about people who have experience in what they're talking about :)

No post body was provided.

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

#256

Post by gruez »

seaourfreed wrote: post #242
xyzzy123 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

...because the healthcare corporations get congress to sell out citizens. $3.5 BILLION flow through lobbyists every year (all industries). Healthcare being a huge part of that. Congress sells out US citizens & corporations fuel it

That's a pretty good deal considering US federal spending alone amounts to 7.3 trillion dollars.

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

#257

Post by formerkrogemp »

bhupy wrote: post #136
nicoburns wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious regulation which almost every other country has is direct price controls on medicines, treatments etc. Not profit percentage controls. A dead simple “this is how much you’re allowed to charge”. I don’t really understand why anybody would be against introducing this in the US.

It is not so obvious at all. Medicare Advantage does not have price controls, and it still costs less per capita than Original Medicare. > A dead simple “this is how much you’re allowed to charge”. This has its own set of unintended consequences, including physician rationing (it's a huge crisis of the NHS right now), and a reduction of investment in new medical research. There are many good reasons to be against int…

> In fact, of the countries that usually make up the global leaders in health/medical innovators, all but 1 (the UK) engage in price controls (https://immigrantinvest.com/insider/the-best-healthcare-coun...), and the UK's NHS is suffering from a rationing crisis, and (ironically) a cost crisis.

The UK's difficulty lie in their leadership and political issues and in the economic consequences of Brexit. I'm not sure it's the best example for your argument.

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

#258

Post by easrng »

irrelative wrote: post #227
easrng wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(ND)JSON is simpler because people actually follow the spec, unlike with CSV.

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

#259

Post by mr_toad »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #165
Titan2189 wrote: post #44

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...

I don’t think you can run BigQuery over a Google drive document.

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

#260

Post by chevman »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #25

I would love to hear from an insider on what the difference is between these published files and the internal databases - I'm sure the difference between the two is striking. Malicious compliance, indeed.

It's really not malicious.

What you are seeing here is essentially part of the claims adjudication process output.

This takes as input the procedure (ie the ICD/CPT code) and the provider, and runs it against the 'plan design' (which essentially is what includes the provider networks and the associated negotiated rates per procedure) and outputs the resultant cost.

Same can be done on the PBM side, just substitute drug for procedure, and 'formulary' for 'plan design'.

The interesting question when you look at cross plan, cross provider, and cross carrier variances, is why :)

Many companies, careers, and lawsuits, are being born from this data drop. Will be fun times the next decade or so to see how this plays out.

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