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Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

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Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#21

Post by bell-cot »

> ... my vote ... is for universal healthcare. The only real downside to it is that a bunch of companies that have entrenched their positions taking advantage of ordinary people will be denied a little profit.

Make that "many, many billions of dollars of profit". Then add on the probably-millions of jobs which the staggering inefficiencies of the current system support. (Everything from lobbyists for those companies, to the minions stamping "Denied" on health insurance claims, to the opposing medical billing staff who work for doctors & hospitals & such that need to get paid, to ...)

It'd be lovely if the leviathan could be slain, but don't hold your breath.

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#22

Post by Taikonerd »

wat10000 wrote: post #9
petesergeant wrote: post #2

Private healthcare isn't the problem, lack of free healthcare is the problem. I would much rather live in the UK where private healthcare is good and reasonably priced than Canada where in most places it's simply not available.

Americans have been propagandized like crazy and don't really understand what can actually be done. "Single-payer" is treated as a synonym for "universal health care." "Private" is seen as mutually exclusive. People will say we should/shouldn't have something like Europe, then describe a system that only a handful of countries have.

Yeah, I find it discouraging that "single-payer" and "fully socialized" are treated like synonyms.

The "Bismarck model"[0] describes a family of healthcare models where people pay into a central healthcare fund, and that fund then pays medical providers -- which can be private businesses.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismarck_model

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#23

Post by notaigenerated »

kiicia wrote: post #11
ajmurmann wrote: post #5

Good article in general but such a misleading headline and framing. The problem, as described in the article's body, is employer-provided health insurance, not private healthcare.

it's connected via vicious cycle private healthcare is getting more and more expensive due to private prices available to bulk insurers but not for private person even if this is not completely deliberate, effect is that you are "serf of whomever pays your insurance" or go bankrupt the moment you have any kind of emergency in europe some private healthcare providers are showing their colors from different perspective…

> effect is that you are "serf of whomever pays your insurance"

That's why in normal countries public healthcare is a thing and it competes with the private healthcare sector, forcing it to offer relatively affordable premium services.

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#24

Post by petesergeant »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #10
petesergeant wrote: post #2

Private healthcare isn't the problem, lack of free healthcare is the problem. I would much rather live in the UK where private healthcare is good and reasonably priced than Canada where in most places it's simply not available.

All doctor's offices in Canada are in fact private businesses. It's not actually a fully socialized system. It's just there's a single payer. Those businesses bill the provincial government instead of you. Most of the dysfunctions in the Canadian system come down to provinces screw around with billing and payment and funding. Take your dissatisfaction with the way the government manages payments to the voting booth i…

> a history of actually producing very good health outcomes

It may outperform the US, but it doesn't outperform normal countries.

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#25

Post by abeppu »

In the US market, where union participation is also very low, it's weird to me that this is an important reason people stay in their jobs, may influence what kind of jobs you take (full time vs contracting?), but:

- job offers generally do not want to get into details on the health insurance offering. it's not a main "competition" point

- except when subject to some kind of union negotiated contract, the employer can change their insurance options from year to year as they try to save costs, but it's not regarded as a mass pay cut when they do

- there's no standard metric on "how much do our employees pay on healthcare" (i.e. employee premium contributions, deductibles, copays), "how much time do employees spend on the phone with the insurance company", and certainly no way to feed in your last year's records of health-care to see "on plan Y you would have paid C"

Though I think the private health insurance system is a dumb waste of overhead and paperwork and misaligned incentives, I do think that people would be more willing to switch jobs if they could know their plan was at least as good as the one they were leaving, both in money spent and in employee satisfaction. Opacity, in part owing to lack of commitment from employers, makes this harder.

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#26

Post by tamimio »

I don’t think it’s just healthcare, you have mortgages for inflated housing prices, expensive groceries and bills, and other expenses that make most people go to the route of boring stable job rather than innovative startup that might be out of business in a year and/or paying peanuts. Look at Canada for example, you can have a boring government job looking at excel sheets in the few hours you “actually” work in that week and still make $140k a year plus generous benefits, meanwhile you can grind your ass in a startup doing embedded firmware development and paid $70k a year with barely any benefits, hell, I have seen “senior robotic engineers” with a job descriptions enough to launch rockets and the pay is $60k!

Obviously people will go with the first option, innovation won’t feed their kids.

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#27

Post by cwillu »

AlexandrB wrote: post #8
petesergeant wrote: post #2

Private healthcare isn't the problem, lack of free healthcare is the problem. I would much rather live in the UK where private healthcare is good and reasonably priced than Canada where in most places it's simply not available.

Yup. Recently drove 6 hours (each way, twice) to get to a Canadian private clinic to get treatment. This saved approximately a year (or more) of waiting in the public system for a routine outpatient procedure that takes 30 minutes to perform. I was lucky this option was even available within driving distance though. Canada's public healthcare system is massively overloaded and it seems to be getting worse. I really d…

You're describing a provincial issue, not a national one.

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#28

Post by forgetfreeman »

diego_moita wrote: post #15
irdc wrote: post #6

Why is this news? As a European this seems totally obvious.

The European/"Socialist" solutions are never obvious to Americans. It is like parliamentarianism, campaign financing regulations, gun control, multiple political parties, etc. Americans call these things "Socialism" and then freak out about them and refuse to see any good on them.

Just a minor clarification: The Money freaks out, calls these things "Socialism" and then dumps billions on red-baiting campaigns and political donations to defend the (highly profitable) status quo. Most citizens would just like some healthcare.

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#29

Post by snarf21 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #5

Good article in general but such a misleading headline and framing. The problem, as described in the article's body, is employer-provided health insurance, not private healthcare.

It is also frustrated that this was meant to be a temporary hack during WWII that never went away. People should just get $$ into their HSA from their employer and but whatever plan they want.

Re: Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

#30

Post by Taikonerd »

ajross wrote: post #19
Taikonerd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the article sort of conflates the two. It's funny that he (accurately) quotes the Cato Institute as being opposed to employer-provided health insurance... and then implies that the sole alternative is the NHS. Um, I'm pretty sure that's not what the libertarian Cato Institute was suggesting!

With all respect: what exactly is the alternative you're imagining? The market emphatically did not provide accessible private health care to individuals, largely because of the wellness trap (no one buys insurance until they need it). It existed only as extremely expensive boutique products until the government put its regulatory thumb on the scale and passed the ACA. Employer health care may have bad externalities,…

My point was there are lots of models available, not just 2. My post above wasn't endorsing one in particular.

I would say that the ACA is on the free market-ish side of the design space: individuals purchasing (subsidized) insurance from private companies.

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