191–200 of 463 posts
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Not technically "insurance", these are cost-sharing companies. Often religious due to Obama's brilliance.
Is there evidence that Obama wanted those religious exemptions and bullshit cost sharing plans? I would be willing to bet that was a concession to other politicians in Congress in order to get ACA passed.
It will be fun to watch people be positive on this until they are reminded who we have to thank for it. Edit: CNN hasn't forgotten, notice the obvious negative spin, with literally zero argument of how this may be beneficial: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/04/politics/hospital-price-trans...
Every president has pushed for this except Bush Jr.
Glad it finally happened even if it was under who I consider to be the worst president* in the last 100 years of US history. Doesn't mean I need to thank him. If you were being tortured in a Mexican cartel prison, would you thank the torturer for giving you glass of water?
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Sometimes medical procedure names have commas in them. Instead of text qualifying them, it can be faster to write code that uses a different semi-standard delimiter. It sucks, but, like, I don't really blame people for being in a hurry to fix a problem.
Or they could be using a legacy system that exports data in that format from times before CSV was invented/standardized. For example, SCO Unix's Informix SQL's `UNLOAD TO SELECT ...` queries output in a format that's very much like what avs733 describes, only that the values aren't separated by pipes, they're terminated by them, so every record ends with a pipe character. If that's the case, there's unfortunately no…
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Yes, in a single-payer environment everyone is in-network. Every doctor in Canada providing covered medical services is in-network.
I was told by a cancer patient in the US, who is a Canadian citizen, that specialized equipment and certain tests are not available in the entire system, or months-long wait times.
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I'm not a fan of the guy, but this is probably the most important/good thing he did with his presidency. Price transparency is the most fundamental first step to driving down health care costs. Once people get a taste of it, it will drive even more, better and accurate data. Start real conversations about costs and open the door to measureable improvement through innovation.
Price transparency is a pointless shell game designed to keep everyone strung along on the entrenched, failed system. When you're having a heart attack, the last thing you're doing is shopping around for the best prices on heart attack emergency treatment. The free market has no place in health care, because in the hands of the free market the first thing that will happen in a life-threatening emergency is for you to…
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> These prices are There are some clever insurance companies whose entire model is "tell the hospital you don't have insurance, get the cash price, pay it with this debit card we give you."
You’re probably thinking of “healthcare ministries,” which are not insurance (they’re scams).
citation or story?
Local hospital released this as an Excel spreadsheet (Chargemaster). They have a column called "Uninsured cash price." These prices are And, no, I don't think this was by accident as they have updated this Excel spreadsheet several times and only that one column is always set to 0 size.
And this can really cause issues for people who are insured because if an insurance company decides not to cover something (very very common, even in-network) then the inflated price is what you end up getting billed for. That is until you call the hospital and find out there's all sorts of "sliding" prices etc... I had a procedure billed for one of these drastically larger "insured" codes which got denied based on t…
Which is why hospitals charge higher prices to insurance companies.
Insurance companies often blanket deny every single claim made against them. This forces the hospital revenue cycle department to have an appeals nurse review just about every procedure done in the hospital, and justify its use. This almost always results in a "discount" for something by virtue of a care provider not justifying every action they take.
Revenue cycle management departments used to be small, about 1 per 1000 hospital employees. Today, they are so big - and make so much money* - that hospital systems are spinning off their revenue cycle management companies for billions of dollars. Private equity firms have been acquiring in this space like mad since about 2016.
* Really, they are actually getting the money that is already owed.
Around 2012 before my wife and I were married, we both got pneumonia. I was insured through my employer, she was uninsured. We went to urgent care at the same time on the same day, saw the same doctor and got prescribed the same drugs. About a month later when the bills came, her bill with no insurance was somewhere in the $160 range. My bill after insurance was nearly $300. I'm still peaved about this.
Did you have a HDHP (high deductible plan)? In that case, you have no co-pay or anything until your deductible is used up. Employers typically contribute a good amount towards this deductible (or even more than) using an HSA. It's still crazy that the bills were so completely divergent.
I am one of the people responsible for making these lists. The fact that the general public as well as journalists think this data is accurate in anyway is really funny. This an exercise of futility that only increases the overall cost and provides job security for me :) No one working in a hospital knows how much do we acquire things for, or how much we get paid for doing things in advance. And only like 8 people ca…
I think the issue here is that the system that has been setup is so dysfunctional that there is some validity to the phrase "the cost is unknowable". But prior to this regulation, it was extremely difficult to even ascertain just how dysfunctional it all was. Putting it out in the open means more accountability for providers and insurers. Which in due time means more regulation :) Which is how it goes when an industr…
Many people may not see the medical cost world as misbehaving at all. It sounds like healthcare companies, from drug manufacturers to hospitals, are charging what the market will bare.
The inelasticity of the products and services for sale are what allows this market to become so out of whack. I don’t need an iPad that badly, but I do need to have these drugs to have a good quality of life.
I’m glad we’re taking these steps on the journey of making costs more transparent and understandable. And perhaps putting into law what we the people think is a reasonable approach to charging for life-saving treatments, rather than “whatever the company can get away with.”