Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 168 posts

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#91

Post by skohan »

hackerlight wrote: post #50
thesuitonym wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand because you think we have a society built around making life better for everyone. It's not. Our society currently is optimized for one thing: Making sure the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor. In that respect, AI is amazing. AI requires a small upfront cost, then can do the job of thousands of people for the pay of less than one. It works 24 hours, and will never ask for more money. And it w…

> AI requires a small upfront cost, then can do the job of thousands of people That's the same with every efficiency improvement. Efficiency improvements (like AI) aren't zero sum. When production costs go down, competition forces prices to also go down, which then leads to more wealth for everyone not just the capital owners (even if it disproportionately benefits capital owners). People are made redundant and then…

That's the problem with healthcare. Due to inelastic demand, it doesn't succumb to market forces the way as other markets. Also in many places you have issues with provider collusion, monopoly, and regulatory capture keeping prices high.

The US is particularly bad in this respect. Market sources only seem to prevail in rare cases - like elective procedures which are not covered by insurance (i.e. laser eye surgery).

It's hard to make decisions based on price when you don't even know the price in many cases before receiving care, and you may not have any choice of provider.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#92

Post by ngai_aku »

bawana wrote: post #88

Do any of you remember how healthcare was in the 60s before corporate America got involved? It just worked. The uninsured got taken care of. A 300 bed hospital had 3 administrators. Now we have a whole army of people in the hospital who have to justify their jobs by the number of emails they send.

The ‘60s were 55+ years ago, so it’s unlikely that many here remember that.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#94

Post by rqtwteye »

rchaud wrote: post #11

Earlier discussion on this topic, with the original source link from ArsTechnica: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38299921 (Nov 17, 2023) As I said on that thread: the dangers of AI will always come down to human decisions made on how it should be applied. These 'solutions' will come from the McKinseys and IBMs of the world to serve hospital CEO needs, not those of patients or care providers. For those thinking…

" These 'solutions' will come from the McKinseys and IBMs of the world to serve hospital CEO needs, not those of patients or care providers."

That's the pattern for most internal enterprise software that's being purchased.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#95

Post by to11mtm »

cmiles74 wrote: post #74
snowpid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" For those thinking that AI will reduce healthcare costs by improving efficiency, I point you to the 'electronic medical records' hype of 15 years ago. Are per capita healthcare costs any lower now? " Can you elaborate? In countries like Denmark or Estonia electronic medical records are well used among doctors and patients.

In the US, the cost of health care has not significantly decreased since the introduction of rules, regulations and government money pushing healthcare organizations to implement and use EHR systems. I would say all of the intervention by the US federal government has made everything much worse. The EHR vendors (I'm looking at you, Epic) managed to consume the money thrown at the problem and yet have only moderately…

Epic is an extremely weird case.

I knew someone who worked at a company that was contracted to be a support provider; they had at least one nervous breakdown.

Also interesting to note that the wikipedia article for the company mentions that in some European countries, moving to Epic was a huge pain that caused doctors stress.

OTOH apparently their actual corporate campus is some whimsical Alice-in-wonderland world with no expense spared.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#96

Post by manicennui »

cryptonector wrote: post #70
manicennui wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is what Americans mean when they parrot bullshit about freedom: the freedom for corporations to do whatever they like in pursuit of profit.

We don't have a free market in healthcare in the U.S. though. You can be for a free market and against the abomination we currently have. If we just went back to 80%/20%, high-premium-or-high-deductible proper insurance , no HMOs, no PPOs, no co-pays, none of that nonsense, with published pricing, then we'd have a free market.

Thanks for proving my point.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#97

Post by tempodox »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #30

Alternate headline: "Our Healthcare System continues to deny claims, now with AI". Makes it clearer who the culprit is.. its not AI. They have been denying claims for decades without any help from AI too.

Yes, but if “AI” denies you, humans are suddenly no longer responsible.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#98

Post by rqtwteye »

protoman3000 wrote: post #26

> Even when users successfully appealed these AI-generated determinations and win, they’re greeted with follow up AI-dictated rejections just days later, starting the process all over again. Wait, what? Does that mean they can just take your money and reject your request to cover treatment until you die even if you had every right to do so?

Technically no, but you need to be able to afford paying for lawyers to fight them or spend an enormous amount of time and energy.

For some reason health insurances and hospitals can get away with practices that no other business would get away with. They can commit fraud and when they get caught, all they have to do is to say "oops" and fix the mistake. No other consequences. It's pretty crazy

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#99

Post by losteric »

skohan wrote: post #87
forgetfreeman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A naïve readthrough would lead one to that conclusion perhaps but the elephant in the room here is capitalism. Pragmatically, any "good enough" solution will be used to replace skilled care to improve patient throughput and thus the bottom line.

The problem is that "skilled healthcare" is essentially a cartel which uses artificial scarcity to increase the price. You can see the counter-example in Cuba, which has an incredibly high number of MD's per capita compared to other countries, and achieves very good healthcare results, especially in the context of other metrics of development and economy. There are so pitifully few health care practitioners compared…

What about nursing? That seems to be the flip side where there isn't the protection of the cartel around doctors, so wages get driven to the floor and we see scarcity due to cost of living and mismanagement.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#100

Post by mindslight »

cryptonector wrote: post #70
manicennui wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is what Americans mean when they parrot bullshit about freedom: the freedom for corporations to do whatever they like in pursuit of profit.

We don't have a free market in healthcare in the U.S. though. You can be for a free market and against the abomination we currently have. If we just went back to 80%/20%, high-premium-or-high-deductible proper insurance , no HMOs, no PPOs, no co-pays, none of that nonsense, with published pricing, then we'd have a free market.

I'm all for reforms to move towards a more market based system. But one has to recognize that at this point we're nearing a century of anti-market meddling - a quick search says 1943 is when healthcare started getting bundled with employment!

And talking about a "free" market is a red herring. There's no reason to believe that the current industry actually wishes to converge on uniform prices with upfront transparency - they could just start publishing such prices at any time currently, but rather continue to benefit from heavy price discrimination. So getting to a functioning healthcare market would actually take a lot of regulation that actively undoes the cancerous behemoth that's been slowly grown. Try asking any doctor how much something might cost and most of the time they will scoff - the rejection of any market dynamics has become pervasive by the entire system.

Also to have an actual free market we'd need to eliminate things like mandatory pharmaceutical prescriptions and patents, which there is unfortunately very little support for doing.

Post reply on HN