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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

#311
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Canada is the only country I know of that has only one system - public. So your claim of public + private being the issue makes no sense when almost every country has that.

Also Cuba and North Korea.

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

#312

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).

AU is closer to double that

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Least you could do is search for something so simple before asserting it on HN https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/external-data-drive

Nah this was a 300IQ pro gamer move. Cunningham's Law.

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

#314
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to the majority of working age adults. Even the US uses Medicare for certain congenital diseases as well (as well as end-stage renal disease). The Swiss private KV system accounts for the vast majority of health expenditure, even more so than the US where half of health expenditure is nationalized in Medicare and Medicaid.

But another way in which Switzerland maintains its healthcare system with public money is through the -often deficitary- cantonal hospitals/clinics/health care centers (also helped at the municipal level)

As a heads up, ‘deficitary’ doesn’t mean ‘deficit running’ in English. It is closer to the word ‘deficient’ which I don’t think is your intended meaning. Thanks for the insightful comments.

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

#315
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentioned CSV files, it seems more like a reflection of what a huge bureaucracy the US healthcare system is. I liked their suggestion that the government should have created the database as part of the law, done the processing on the raw data, and made it more accessible.

import a CSV into Postgres with open(filepath) as fd: first_line = fd.readline() cols = [] for col in first_line.strip().split(','): col2 = f'''"{col.strip('"')}" text''' cols.append(col2) cols2 = ','.join(cols) print(f"create table {table_name} ({cols2});") print(f"\copy {table_name} from '{filepath}' csv header;") this variant will ingest whatever trash is in your CSV fields as-is (cast & cleanup later) run the out…

Do NOT read a CSV file by splitting on commas. Python has a perfect CSV library built right in: https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html.

If you split on commas, your code will fail for quoted fields with commas in them.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Singapore which has exceptionally low healthcare spending yea because they have healthy population, its not because of some smart govt policy( if only it was that easy). singapore obesity rate = 10% usa obesity rate = 42 % usa obesity healthcare spend = 90%

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...

I wonder though how much this drives up the cost.

Because obesity also drives down lifespan, and age has a huge impact on healthcare expenditures.

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

#318
post #253

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).

Most want be unemployed they will just make a lot less. Doctors, Surgeons and administrators are barely breaking 6 figures in many socialized systems, and those come with far higher tax burdens typically.

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

#319
post #89

Earlier 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…

To be fair, energy isn't just kWh. A Joule delivered during times of peak demand costs more to produce (or has a larger opportunity cost) than a Joule during a lull.

Also a marginal Joule that you can demand at will is different from one that you committed to months in advance.

Similarly for data.

Of course, in practice most plans don't reflect this 'essential' complexity, but are full of accidental complexity to confuse people.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Least you could do is search for something so simple before asserting it on HN https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/external-data-drive

Nah this was a 300IQ pro gamer move. Cunningham's Law.

Hahahaha. That genuinely made me chuckle :)
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