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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

#441

Post by specialist »

refurb wrote: post #416
specialist wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Life expectancy is a terrible measure for quality of healthcare. ...lifestyle, smoking rates, alcohol and drug abuse, accidents, suicides, genetics. Only if we assume public health is unrelated to individual health.

OK, so if we assume that, then is public health worse in Europe because smoking rates are higher than the US? How about higher alcohol consumption? Using life expectancy to judge the quality of a healthcare system or quality of public health efforts is like judging car quality by how nice the body work is. It's a component, but a relatively minor one in overall quality.

Why are you asking me when you could just google?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

Western Europe does better, Eastern Europe does worse. Pretty much as one would expect.

--

Your prior "5 year cancer survival rate" was pretty random. The cherry picking of one favorable stat while ignoring the mountain of counterfactuals.

I was confused.

Then I spotted this.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-vs-europe-life-expectancy-...

Aha. Just another "libertarian" talking point. Good grief.

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

#442

Post by specialist »

sgerenser wrote: post #434
refurb wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life expectancy is a terrible measure for quality of healthcare. It ignore so many other factors. The only way it could be a suitable measure if you assumed every human in every country was the same except for the healthcare they receive. It's pretty clear they aren't - lifestyle, smoking rates, alcohol and drug abuse, accidents, suicides, genetics. You’re far better to look at things like “survival after cancer diag…

Good article on the topic of assigning a cause-and-effect relationship between life expectancy and health care systems: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-21/does-t...

I prefer the non-snark, non-partisan version of that narrative.

https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low

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

#443

Post by nuclearnice1 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #408
ohgodplsno wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservatives hate that their money is taken away to fund poor people and take money away from their rich friends, and it brings them to defund healthcare, liberals hate that it creates a natural monopoly and their inability to see a functioning society work without private hospitals brings them to defund healthcare

There's no point pretending you know what people's motivations are. Conservatives I've read/heard seem to generally want similar outcomes, but disagree drastically on the methods.

First sentence: don’t guess people’s motivations

Second sentence: explain people’s motivations

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

#444

Post by Cederfjard »

pc86 wrote: post #435
kolbe wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't trust anything else that person told you. You just said what he said, but with emphasis on 100 hour weeks for years on end being good instead of bad. Why did you disagree with me, then go on to list how much doctors work before the get to practice on their own? His point was they get too much training, with much of it being irrelevant (not all). If you're this angry and reactive, you really shouldn't be a doc…

I'll be more clear - doctors have almost no extra or unnecessary training during their residencies. It's all very specialty-driven, or at the very least is specialty-specific public service (e.g. low-income clinics). If anything, the doctors I've spoken to said they should all probably be a year or two longer across the board if only to allow for better work-life balance, but none of them would want to have to go thr…

Taking this discussion at face value, it sounds like US physicians go through substantially more training than their UK counterparts. If true, does that manifest itself in substantially better outcomes for their patients?

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

#445

Post by mtberatwork »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #432
jaarse wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a Canadian, and I would never want to give up our single payer system. That being said, Canada has a huge health care problem right now. Frequently they need to close emergency services in major (& minor) cities at night due to staff shortages. The wait times for basic diagnostics is on the order of months (not days or weeks). For example, a relative of mine has lost 90 pounds since the start of the year, complai…

> The wait times for basic diagnostics is on the order of months (not days or weeks). The crazy thing to me about this is, most Americans simply skip medical procedures, or tests due to cost. So American wait times aren't lower because their hospitals are better, they just server a much smaller pool of people due to so many being priced out of being healthy. And honestly, the longer you go without doctor visits, more…

This is a gray area too as unnecessary testing can be costly and lead to worse care: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/06/13/1104141...

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

#446

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

vitiral wrote: post #440
pessimizer wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're assuming the US healthcare system isn't equally underfunded. You don't have to assume. It costs twice as much as the most expensive health systems on earth, but delivers Afghanistan-level life expectancies. The problem isn't that we're spending too little.

I have really no opinion on any of this, but please realize there are more factors than health care on life expectancy.

What is a better metric and how does the US do on it?

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

#447

Post by refurb »

specialist wrote: post #441
refurb wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so if we assume that, then is public health worse in Europe because smoking rates are higher than the US? How about higher alcohol consumption? Using life expectancy to judge the quality of a healthcare system or quality of public health efforts is like judging car quality by how nice the body work is. It's a component, but a relatively minor one in overall quality.

Why are you asking me when you could just google? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... Western Europe does better, Eastern Europe does worse. Pretty much as one would expect. -- Your prior "5 year cancer survival rate" was pretty random. The cherry picking of one favorable stat while ignoring the mountain of counterfactuals. I was confused. Then I spotted this. https://www.aei.org/carpe-die…

You're arguing in circles and not making a lot of sense.

First I argued that life expectancy isn't a good measure because of lifestyle, then you say "public health should address those", then I argued Europe does worse than the US on several public health metrics like smoking rates and alcohol consumption, then you go back to life expectancy.

I have no idea the point your making because you're failing to actually provide counterfactuals.

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

#448

Post by c7b »

duffpkg wrote: post #89
e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #71

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…

> our patient population is very different from other countries > our expectations are very different from other countries > our scale is dramatically different than other countries > the way are population is taxed is very different than other countries

do you have evidence to support these claims? what makes the US patient population or their expectations or the US taxation system unique in the world?

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

#449

Post by Dave3of5 »

duffpkg wrote: post #70

I'm author of Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly, 20 year health system executive, blah, blah. It's very easy for people to forget the scale of the US "health system", we are talking 1/5, maybe more, of the entire US economy. If US healthcare spending were a country, it would have the third largest GDP in the world. Accidents of history and the massive federal beauracracy created the crazy monster of ICD/CPT codes that…

> Accidents of history and the massive federal beauracracy created the crazy monster of ICD/CPT codes

Erm this is incorrect given that ICD are international it's actually the WHO that creates them source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Classification_o...

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

#450

Post by daniel-cussen »

duffpkg wrote: post #70

I'm author of Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly, 20 year health system executive, blah, blah. It's very easy for people to forget the scale of the US "health system", we are talking 1/5, maybe more, of the entire US economy. If US healthcare spending were a country, it would have the third largest GDP in the world. Accidents of history and the massive federal beauracracy created the crazy monster of ICD/CPT codes that…

It's more it's like 38%. Hollywood accounting all the way. In particular the deadweight cost of the the AMA monopoly on licensing is like 50% of GDP, which doesn't sound possible but if you know what a deadweight cost is it's a part of the nation's income that can't exist because it isn't there. It's how much better life would be if a doctor were as cheap as an uber driver, or if people healing others didn't get medium security prison as a result. It's the greatest threat to National Security, more than Russia China and the Middle East combined. And it's a military problem, wounded soldiers yeah get help from the Veteran's Association but they have to compete for those doctors and it ends up...out of pocket if they really want good care. Military gets fucked paying for doctors. America spends more money on obesity, than it does on defense. AMA is treason.

Standard Oil had a lot of different shareholders, John D. Rockefeller was never majority owner, that was an organization AMA is an organization there's now medical families. Common heirs. Medical students from a medical family get little hazing compared to the rest. All the maneuvers they make to avoid the words "monopoly" and "cornered market" are of no help and mitigate nothing. So they know people get fucked off with those words, like bad, they're afraid of those words.

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