21–30 of 390 posts
To be slightly more honest: he wasn't the doctor assigned to me on intake, he was another doctor from another hospital across the street as a consultant IMHO trying to get onto my case so he could bill me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at healthcare vs GDP, the US is way above the line compared to comparable countries. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-... I think scaling the average costs from other countries accounting for GDP would be a good way to set the rates.
This is one of those nice ideas that has some pretty serious hidden costs. You’d struggle to compare healthcare in the US to other countries, because the quality of healthcare available (talking about availability, not accessibility) in the US is generally superior to other countries. So you could end up simply eroding the quality of care in the US. Another thing people tend not to talk about when discussing healthca…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of those nice ideas that has some pretty serious hidden costs. You’d struggle to compare healthcare in the US to other countries, because the quality of healthcare available (talking about availability, not accessibility) in the US is generally superior to other countries. So you could end up simply eroding the quality of care in the US. Another thing people tend not to talk about when discussing healthca…
You're implying that both the quality of care and the amount of medical research done is a result of the profits of the medical companies. I'm not sure that this is the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at healthcare vs GDP, the US is way above the line compared to comparable countries. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-... I think scaling the average costs from other countries accounting for GDP would be a good way to set the rates.
This is one of those nice ideas that has some pretty serious hidden costs. You’d struggle to compare healthcare in the US to other countries, because the quality of healthcare available (talking about availability, not accessibility) in the US is generally superior to other countries. So you could end up simply eroding the quality of care in the US. Another thing people tend not to talk about when discussing healthca…
It's funny that co-pay I am paying for a service in the USA is comparable to a full private treatment with the same quality in Poland, where I grew up.
It can be difficult for a patient to determine quality of care. And difficult to compare country against country. Poland is similar to USA in cardiovascular care, but much worse in cancer : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality...
Based on the pdf linked from the OECD page [0] it looks like they're measuring the reported incidents of cancer based on medical records.
The medical records for the US may be skewed because they only cover the well-off (after all, the poor can't afford healthcare), while in other countries, like Poland, everyone rich and poor receives care and are included in the statistic.
Also, the numbers on wikipedia are stale, but they don't seem to have changed that much on the OEDC website. The ux is garbage so I didn't click around that much.
[0]: https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Definitions-of-Healt...
The next logical step is to require written estimates in advance, just like the auto repair industry.
This is almost completely meaningless unless it's paired with some serious help in figuring out the total cost of a visit. Every service that offers this sort of price transparency I've seen so far lists the prices for single insurance billing codes at a time. A lay person isn't going to understand the total cost of the visit from that, because there's no way to figure out which billing codes are going to be make up…
"A lay person isn't going to understand the total cost of the visit from that, because there's no way to figure out which billing codes are going to be make up everything that's been billed for different types of visits." Another problem is, for many, you won't even know what your ailment and treatments will be until after.
Progress is progress, even if it's not perfect. Many people get diagnosed and treated on separate visits, and many more have long-term illnesses that they know relatively well. Soon there will be a proliferation of guides for common long-term illnesses like diabetes, detailing what billing codes you can expect. Eventually, I hope to be able to put a condition (say, pregnancy) along with some personal information into a computer, and get out the flow matrix telling me the probabilities of all possible futures and the costs of each. That's a long way off, but this is the first step.
When medical costs are being discussed, the relatively rare situation of being rushed in to a hospital unconscious for doctors to do a series of completely unpredictable procedures on you tends to get focused on almost exclusively. In reality, a huge fraction of medical expenses go to (comparatively) predictable things like cancer treatments, where an operation will be scheduled out two weeks in advance. Even a day's notice would be enough time for price selection to happen, if all you had to do was look at a list of providers, prices and success rates.
My guess is that eventually the govt will step in and start regulating prices if providers don’t. One interesting idea (not well thought out at all) would say that all prices need to be +\- 50% of what Medicare pays. Medicare pays $20,000 for stent placement? Great! You can charge whatever you want up to $30,000. A lot of effort goes into setting Medicare rates (and they are based on self reported costs across the co…
If you look at healthcare vs GDP, the US is way above the line compared to comparable countries. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-... I think scaling the average costs from other countries accounting for GDP would be a good way to set the rates.