51–60 of 171 posts
So not only shouldn’t healthcare be a market good (moral argument), but healthcare profiteers are actively distorting the market and are not taking seriously efforts to provide a modicum of information to participants in this so-called market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of countries which operate functioning public health systems with optional private care. There is no daydreaming required.
> There are plenty of countries which operate functioning public health systems with optional private care. You mean the US...? It's a quaint idea... but nobody likes the reality once it's implemented. Evidenced by the fact that the US is already the largest public health system in the world, and people do not even realize it.
I'm not sure why you're ignoring a lot of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine a world where Yes, and let's also imagine all of the existing single-payer systems (de facto or otherwise) work as advertised and didn't have elites-with-means flee to other nations for quality care. Let's also imagine these systems provide stellar quality care and more importantly, timely care. We can daydream all we want - but the reality isn't so obvious or absolute. For those who are really in the know.…
My personal experience as a European citizen living in the U.S. is drastically different. I flee the U.S. to have all my medical related tests and work, out of pocket, in the E.U. And it is cheaper and much much better experience. (And I don't get different treatment compared to any members of my family that are insured in Europe for paying out of pocket.) First of all: I speak with a doctor. Not a nurse, an administ…
Wow. Imagine a world where one entity received all the peoples medical bills instead. Too bad the EU can't achieve that.
There are two problems here: 1) Hanlon’s razor 2) The author doesn’t understand health insurance data. I’m not trying to excuse the other bad behavior, but within the data itself, he’s experiencing a combination of health insurers’ incompetence, the kludged up data models they’ve had to build to represent the output of the multiple generations of claims processing systems and other administrative processes, and the g…
This data should be verified by matching it against claims data.
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Hanlon’s razor? Really? Across multiple actors each with motivation and means to act maliciously? Riiiiiight…
I really wish we could effectively apply Hanlon’s Razor in these cases and force the CEO and board of directs to literally chose between "are you and your CIO malicious" or "is your CIO so grossly incompetent that you have utterly failed in your fiduciary duty"
I am not sure why this is even a divisive topic. Sure discuss how a doctor decorates their office. Who cares. When you are dying or are in pain, nothing but treatment at any cost matters.
Imagine a world where one entity received all the peoples medical bills and was incentived to negotiate for the lowest possible rate from each provider. Imagine the savings alone from reducing a massively overly bureaucratic and complicated system down to just one entity negotiating and paying the health service providers. Just imagine in that world this article would have never needed to have been written.
They just suck in different manners, different countries have different degrees of "suckness" and so on.
And then there's the big problem beyond the question of who is paying: How much is being paid.
Healthcare costs in the US are absurdly high both on relative terms (things are way more expensive) and on absolute terms (more of the same things is needed because the American population is relatively too unhealthy for what you'd expect in a developed country with similar demographics). You need to ask why relatively inexpensive stuff like insulin is so much expensive in America than say, Germany or the UK.
If you don't solve this issue, a single payer system would probably become more similar to the terrible situation in most Latin American countries, where you have terrible supposedly universal public healthcare systems, but where in practice if you can pay for private insurance, you will do it.
Name any other industry where neither transparent pricing exists nor government socialization exists. The health insurance industry is quietly and uniquely one of the darkest markets in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are plenty of countries which operate functioning public health systems with optional private care. You mean the US...? It's a quaint idea... but nobody likes the reality once it's implemented. Evidenced by the fact that the US is already the largest public health system in the world, and people do not even realize it.
No, functioning, so not like the US, universal public health care with costs covered by the government. I'm not sure why you're ignoring a lot of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
These are exactly the ones I had in mind.
> universal public health care with costs covered by the government.
To be pedantic, this doesn't exist anywhere in the world. The taxpayers foot the bill universally. You may not personally care, but it matters when we're discussing spending other people's money.
In the US, we already have universal public health care. If you cannot afford to pay a portion of your premium, you can be eligible for healthcare at zero expense to you.
The US government spends more on healthcare than any other nation. The US is already socialized healthcare. It's just not the utopia people thought it would be so they continue to complain...
It gets way more complicated than we can discuss here - things like private premiums are so expensive because the socialized system does not pay it's entire bill, etc. The entire thing is a massive C.F. but speeding further down that same tunnel is not going to suddenly magically make it better. It's very much-so the "but we can do it better" mentality, despite however many previous attempts there has been.
We should compel these companies to comply. There should be fine a 1% of annual revenue for every day these companies are in non compliance with prison for the ceo if they are non compliant for over thirty days.