211–220 of 690 posts
Is Japan's life expectancy because of its healthcare or culture? I'm pretty sure Americans would not live to the same age as Japanese even with Japanese healthcare because of our low nutrition high sugar diets...
> Japan spends ~$5,790 and has the highest life expectancy in the OECD Is Japan's life expectancy because of its healthcare or culture? I'm pretty sure Americans would not live to the same age as Japanese even with Japanese healthcare because of our low nutrition high sugar diets...
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Japan also has the "Metabo Law" (aka fat tax). Do you think Americans would go for that?
"Obesity costs the US healthcare system almost $173 billion a year." So that's about 6% of the difference? I'm not immediately saying no, but it sounds like that's not the real problem.
Medicare prices are too low to operate on. They generally factor in the bare minimum or slightly less for the variable costs of a procedure but severely under value the fixed costs of providing the same procedure. So those costs largely get pushed to commercial payors as those are the only ones who can shoulder it. There’s plenty of arguements about waste and executive compensation but when I was a healthcare CFO we…
Sure you’re not thinking of Medicaid? Medicare was generally pretty good for reimbursement. When my wife treated Medicaid patients, she often lost money on the cost of the supplies used to treat them, let alone rent and paying the staff etc etc. Most doctors who see Medicaid patients do it as basically pro bono. Some figured out how to game the system with economies of scale but it’s nearly impossible do do and maint…
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> 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…
You should take your own advice and widen your media sources. 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.
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…
> health insurers...'re on your team and benefit from lower prices just as much as you do 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 . Th…
Not in Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland_hospital_payment_syst...
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"Obesity costs the US healthcare system almost $173 billion a year." So that's about 6% of the difference? I'm not immediately saying no, but it sounds like that's not the real problem.
That 6% number isn't even close to accurate. There are many other very expensive chronic conditions that are downstream of obesity including type-2 diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, MSK injuries, etc. We are digging our graves with our teeth.
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What we can say for certain is that heath insurance companies in the US stuff their pockets with tens of billions in profits each year and that Americans are paying far more while getting less for their money than other developed nations. I don't think those two things are unrelated.
What is the profit margin of a health insurance company? Google suggests 2-4%, with United at about 6%. This does not seem that extravagant.
One underlying, perverse incentive behind many of the problems is that insurers are regulated based on percentages of spending rather than total costs.
The US passed laws meant to limit marketing and overhead that tied insurers economics to the size of the overall medical bill... which means as healthcare spending rises, the dollars they’re allowed to retain can rise too, which basically means they're incentivized to drive costs up rather than down.
Here's a link to the book: https://www.helmpublishing.com/products/an-american-sickness...