201–210 of 690 posts
If what we defined as care was constant, it would get cheaper over time. But it doesn't stay constant.
Firey take, but health insurers are not the problem they are made out to be. They're on your team and benefit from lower prices just as much as you do. They don't make any money either, don't argue with me, buy their stocks if you are so convinced and see how that goes over. Health care providers carry immense blame. It's full of passionless people in it for the outsized paychecks, who once inside will just seek what…
You're missing a very, very, very important piece here.
Which is that the lowest price of all is to deny treatment entirely.
They are not on your team, they are the opposite team. Their revenue is basically fixed, at the level of your premiums. But the more health care they pay for you to receive, the less profit they make. That's just arithmetic.
This is why there are so many horror stories of people being denied necessary treatment, or having to fight for months and years to get their treatment actually paid for. Insurance providers are incentivized to do their absolute best at taking your money and then not paying for care, through every sort of technicality and "mistake" and arbitrary judgment and limit they can come up with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ACA enshrined the worst parts of the American healthcare system for years to come. It is a politicized victory that is the best solution for no American citizens. Places I’ve been with fully privatized healthcare or single payer are both significantly better for consumers. Insurance companies have raised prices to restore profit, were briefly a mandatory expense, and will exist for years to come.
> ACA enshrined the worst parts of the American healthcare system for years to come before the ACA, insurers could deny coverage for pre-existing conditions people have forgotten how bad things used to be
Not really, because whereas before things were bad for people with pre-existing conditions, now they are really bad for everyone.
People are paying exorbitant prices either for insurance, for routine health care stuff, or for both.
There was no free lunch, so we traded some health care for the chronically ill, for slightly less healthcare for everyone else. The insurance companies make sure it's an extractive zero-sum game in terms of actual healthcare provided.
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> nearly half of medical spending > something like 2 FTEs focusing just on the reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid 2FTE’s vs what? The question isn’t is this free, the question is how large is the total staff including price negotiations, doctors, and IT time spent handling billing issues, and is Medicare more or less than 50% of the total. I am ware of one hospital and 2 medical clinics where the difference is…
2FTE’s vs what? versus nothing. Hospitals don't have to maintain a whole team for UnitedHealth, or for Anthem, etc. This is my point. Medicare cooks the books to look more efficient by offloading their administrative costs onto providers. Other payers can't do that because, even if huge, they don't operate at the same scale. Think about it: we often hear on the news about disputes about contracts when a local hospita…
I work in this area and you're right that Medicare can require a huge amount of paperwork from providers. And a hospital will have far more than 2 FTEs for this (it's called Revenue Cycle Management).
Firey take, but health insurers are not the problem they are made out to be. They're on your team and benefit from lower prices just as much as you do. They don't make any money either, don't argue with me, buy their stocks if you are so convinced and see how that goes over. Health care providers carry immense blame. It's full of passionless people in it for the outsized paychecks, who once inside will just seek what…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I happen to be in Costa Rica for the month. Just like every other 1st world country, it has managed to have universal health care that is better and cheaper without private insurance. Even if you do get private insurance for quicker access, it’s still much cheaper than the US. I just spoke to someone who flew down here to save $30K on dental work. The problem isn’t the ACA, it’s the ass backwards American health c…
It's a difficult fix, because the real issue here isn't who pays, but how much it's paid, total. If the cost of care in the US was the same as the cost in, say, Spain, the vast majority of people would have little problem paying out of pocket, and having just high deductible insurance for really big ticket items. At the same time, it'd be easy to have the government pay for it all. The US system is just very expensiv…
Not to mention that because of Bush, the government is not allowed to negotiate drug prices.
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>So insurance companies spend more so they can collect higher premiums. That's how they make more money. > If this is correct, then how come there are so many complaints about insurance denying payment for healthcare or the hoops they make patients and doctors jump through for pre authorizations? If the path to more profit was spend more money, then there would be no reason to question a doctors’ orders? Nor threaten…
> If this is correct, then how come there are so many complaints about insurance denying payment for healthcare or the hoops they make patients and doctors jump through for pre authorizations? Because those anecdotes get reader and viewer engagement. Charts comparing how much U.S. insurers pay on average for common procedures compared to, say, the UK NHS, don’t drive forward the narrative. You should interrogate the…
Yes, you only get a continuous glucose monitor for free if you really need it on the NHS. If you want one otherwise you need to spend $100. It's not going to bankrupt you.
If you ever want to "sanewash" healthcare spending in the US, this random guy stood up an entire website to argue that per-capita healthcare spending in the US is more or less in line with expectations based on per-capita income: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o... TL;DR: As people/countries get richer, a larger share of their money goes towards consumption. It's not just that Americans pa…
My personal experience is that people in the US feel much more entitled to consume medical services than people in the country I came from (UK). They are richer, but there's a cultural difference too.