271–280 of 283 posts
Has anyone aggregated hospital cost data yet or is it something that is only there if you ask for it? Are there hospital APIs for this? Not that they are mutually exclusive, just that I wouldn't imagine a pricing service exists yet if it's just manually gotten.
Take a look at this: https://www.dolthub.com/repositories/dolthub/hospital-price-... It's not a nice interface, but it's raw pricing data for 1400 hospitals.
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There is a very valid reason that hospitalization only insurance was not allowed. The whole point of requiring everyone to get insurance is so that you don't have just the sickliest and oldest people getting insurance. Insurance is meant to spread the risk amongst everyone who pays premiums. Additionally, not having insurance for primary and non-emergency care will make it much less likely that people will even end u…
> The whole point of requiring everyone to get insurance is so that you don't have just the sickliest and oldest people getting insurance. Insurance is meant to spread the risk amongst everyone who pays premiums. So why did it make the insurance costs skyrocket?
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why wouldn't it be? if you leave early, you're no worse off than you were when you graduated med school. I guess you could be worse off if you wouldn't have gone to med school in the first place if the offer wasn't on the table... I'd guess if you leave early you have to pay off your own debt, possibly prorated by years on the job.
To me it seems like such a long period of time that it starts infringing on the employee's freedom. What's the limit? Can you sign somebody up for 50 years of labor?
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Consider that regulation makes a certain tier of solution effectively illegal. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elq2mnHTFUY I know this may look a little dystopian, but solutions of this sort would be illegal in the US and then folks would have no choice but to just go without any help at all. (Save for if charity/gov't step in). Same story with housing. Part of the reason we have homeless ness (or more realistica…
Deregulation of telecoms. Now we have monopolies with no regulatory requirements to provide service to customers. Read: Verizon refusing to rebuild landline areas affected by severe storms. Removal of regulations for ISPs. Data caps. Throttling. Zero metering. Deep packet inspection. Data injection. Opt out (if you even can) tracking. Removal of oversight for agriculture and removal of animal welfare regulations. Mor…
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181469-spacex-sues-us-go...
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To me it seems like such a long period of time that it starts infringing on the employee's freedom. What's the limit? Can you sign somebody up for 50 years of labor?
Seems to be frequent enough with debt I guess.
This contract as presented was much stricter.
The U.S. healthcare system cannot be fixed. Period. Full-stop. The only solution is to nuke it from orbit, pave it over, and start again. It's very easy to point the finger at the conservative party as the one who's screwed it all up, but the other parties are not really putting forward models for successful healthcare systems. If one were to sit down and try to create the most absurd approach to healthcare that guar…
I agree with your initial sentiment completely. I joined my current cofounders (from medical/business backgrounds) for a health tech startup, sold on the dream of saving lives with technology. If my CEO didn't play the game by the absurd rules that are in place, I wouldn't have enough financial incentive to swallow my idealism and stick around. My point being, there are plenty of smart people in this system building…
You pay 5% of your income for example. If you're traveling they pay the other hospital, either at the normal ins. rates or the rates that hospitals...
Example: All the hospitals in utah join. I live in a small town with 45k people.
Only hospital in the county, which is about 60k people.
So the hospital gets 60K * 5% of income - Medicare/Medicaid who would be billed normally.
They get this monthly so they could budget their bills by this income.
Anyone traveling who gets sick in their location the hospital they are subscribed to pays their bill. Hospitals in the network all agree on pricing schemes that are fair so there's really no gouging or alternative prices. Since the payee is other hospitals and they could be on the other side of the price for patients it makes sense to make it reasonable.
Localities could require all residents move to a hospital as insurer model to make the system more streamlined. A tech provider would create software / erp that automatically does the billing so basically you replace billing people on both sides of insurance.
There's probably a lot of small quirks I'm unaware of... but this seems like it could work the larger (multi-state/all 50 states) the network as a whole they could even have significant power to bring down drug prices and equipment purchases for MRI machines/etc as basically a big union of healthcare providers.
Primary care physicians would basically get a "cut" of the subscription monthly + co-pays.
You could pick your "regular" Dentist, PCP, Eyecare, and other "centers" you go to at least a few times per year, and they could divy out funds to them on a recurring basis for the same goal of creating MRR for small healthcare providers locally.
This was a key thing that needed to happen for a long time. Insurance companies had no bargaining power with hospitals and price opacity helped secure that leverage for the hospitals. This is the only sensible thing I can recall to emerge from the Trump administration and it is a much bigger deal than most people realize.
I mentioned that Trump accidentally did something good and got downvoted to zero. Same comment without Trump mention gets up-voted. Interesting and disturbing.
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I called UCSF's price transparency hotline earlier this week, to find out the price of some Xrays, because my insurance - the best plan that I was offered - won't even cover the first $2,000, and then half the cost after that. The pricing transparency hotline told me that they could not give me a quote until I made appointments for the procedures. I called the Xray department. Apparently, they don't set appointments…
did you consider somebody else ? for example sutter health has a price list for common things online https://www.sutterhealth.org/for-patients/health-care-costs-...
I called the insurance, and waited while the agent told me they were calling Sutter sort it out. After they told me it was all sorted, I called Sutter Health, and they still couldn't find me in their system and refused to serve me.
So I called again, with the agent on the line, and Sutter took my information. But, neither the insurance agent nor the Sutter Health representative had any idea how to fix the actual problem, so I'll have to have have this fight every time I work with Sutter Health.
I spent close to two hours on hold today, with the Anthem insurance's help line dropping me from the queue every few minutes.
The only parts of the system that aren't an outright scam are intentionally neglected and broken: still part of the scam.
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Hospitals' bar for reasonably afford is low, in my experience. They want proof that you make poverty line wages or below to write it off, below 300% of poverty line (around 38k) for reductions.
To totally write off, sure. But they will often vastly reduce and/or over 0% interest long term payment plans.
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They will outright REFUSE to give you a quote...forget out-of-network, even IN network?! This is so astonishing cause you would assume they have NEGOTIATED the rate given its in network so there is little variability in what can be charged by the doctor and what can be thrust upon the customer. ex. if you charge $100K more than other in-network doctors, good luck, cause the insurance company is only paying the doctor…
how is that legal? you are telling me you won't know how much sometime costs until you have to pay for the service? is that not illegal? reminds me of Chinese scam of foreigners where women lure men to restaurants on the take and give you a massive bill at the end telling you it does cost that much but since you can't read Chinese its your fault.