I wonder if price gouging laws can be applied in the case of healthcare, especially in the case of emergency care.
What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
311–320 of 592 posts
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
USA dentists don't work on Sunday. If you had waited until Monday you would have had many more options. Besides what could she have possibly done to "fix a broken tooth" in one day? Nobody was milling crowns in the office a decade ago. If it was really just a filling, wow. Do dentists in Europe work on Sunday? In my experience the grocery stores aren't even open...
I've had emergency dental treatment in an NHS hospital in the UK for an extremely painful dental abscess - was treated first thing on a Sunday morning.
> I've had emergency dental treatment in an NHS hospital in the UK for an extremely painful dental abscess - was treated first thing on a Sunday morning.
Emergency dental care is provided in the US as well. Filling a cavity is not considered an emergency.
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So they jack up everyone else’s bills No. That’s the justification given so that people get angry at the wrong thing. Hospitals charge this because they CAN. They are doing what businesses do and that is maximizing their profit. Don’t get angry at the uninsured get angry at the politicians for enabling a broken system.
> Hospitals charge this because they CAN. They are doing what businesses do and that is maximizing their profit. Including all the non-profit hospitals? What's their motivation?
People misunderstand non-profits. There is nothing stopping you or I from starting a non-profit and soliciting donors then paying yourself a $1M salary.
Non-profit simply means any surplus of revenue is spent. So, the more revenue generated by a non-profit's paying customers means they get to funnel that to their core mission (likely research, possibly those that can't pay, or cynically more salary for those running the show).
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although most humans are perfectly ambulatory, there are innumerable reasons why they don't get to "choose where to live". Income levels, employment availability, schooling, racial pressure, and many more factors come in to play. Not everyone can physically fit into the best areas. The best areas for emergency services don't necessarily align with the best education (although very high income levels tends to align wi…
True to an extent, but in any city (100,000 or more people) there will be two hospitals and so the poor can choose which of the two to use. Note that by poor choosing only a small number need to have the practical ability (which is to say the almost middle class) to choose since a hospital will want to attract them and that ups service for everyone even thoose who couldn't reasonably get to the other hospital.
You know the hospitals in this scenario wouldn't be next door to each other, right? The extra 30 minutes of driving time it takes for me to get to my second-closest hospital could easily mean life or death.
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mixing a public option with a private option isn’t that ideal either. The wealthy with their ability to influence politics will lobby to undermine/weaken the public system to save their tax dollars. You are better off with one system so that everyone is entitled to the same level of care. We do this with fire/police, same applies to health.
Why shouldn't someone with means be able to buy a better level of care?
The biggest complaint of public systems is wait times for services. If the rich can jump ahead and get treatment ahead of the poor then congratulations you've built a system that enables the rich to pay for life saving operation, while the poor do not. Right wing parties then spend their time in power weakening the public system so those wait times increase or quality of service lessons.
Another way of looking at it is we don't have private firehalls. I'd argue healthcare is the same.
Interestingly we are moving towards having private security forces, enabling some to be more safe than others. I don't agree with that either. So, maybe it's a philosophical difference, I feel strongly that for basic rights (e.g. health, safety) we should all be treated equal, and money should not grant me special treatment.
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have nice pricing tables for insurances,. Just not for patients. Even unexpected complications will have a billing code but the prices are kept secret.
Insurance companies are very different types of customers than uninsured patients. They're effectively averaging their price over a large number of patients. Most are probably slightly more expensive than necessary, but that difference helps subsidize those that experience complications. Furthermore, individual patients fail to pay at a much higher rate so that is reflected in the cost as well. A hospital can't just…
First step is to publish the numbers so we can see if they make sense.
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We do not have a free market. Most people get their health insurance from their employer - you cannot reasonably get insurance elsewhere What you are describing are in fact the freest parts of the health insurance market. Employers, quite rationally and of their own free will, choose to offer health insurance as a benefit because it attracts and retains talent better than other similarly priced incentives. The fact…
And the reason that healthcare costs $1,000/month, is because this system has caused prices to spiral completely out of control, beyond the level of lunacy. Due to multiple agents in the market behaving of their own free will. Every other developed country manages to provide equivalent care for a fraction of the price. So much for the free market optimizing for better outcomes, eh?
It's about the same price, except you're totally covered and it includes your pension. Oh and you don't even see the money, it's paid by your employer directly.
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#318Exhibit A for why "free market healthcare" is an oxymoron. I have yet to hear a coherent explanation for how anyone can reasonably expect for price discovery to even pretend to function in a market where the consumers can't even guess the prices until after they've already purchased and frequently couldn't reasonably be expected to refuse service even if they did believe it was overpriced.
Price discovery is indeed difficult in the current market. However, the current healthcare market is no where close to a free market. For example, suppose you wanted to start a hospital that offered price transparency, like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma does. (1) In thirty-five states and the District of Columbia, you'd first have to acquire a certificate-of-need (CON) from the state healthcare regulators. In order…
Price discovery requires pricing some people out of the market. Period. There is no "free market" healthcare system that can or ever will deliver required health services to everyone.
Furthermore when the alternative is death or debilitation, the price a "consumer" is willing to pay is effectively everything they possess and can borrow. That is both a massive distortion and non-optimal for the economy as a whole.
There are certainly regulatory inefficiencies and other inefficiencies in healthcare markets, but a truly "free market" in healthcare not morally justifiable.
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Price discovery is indeed difficult in the current market. However, the current healthcare market is no where close to a free market. For example, suppose you wanted to start a hospital that offered price transparency, like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma does. (1) In thirty-five states and the District of Columbia, you'd first have to acquire a certificate-of-need (CON) from the state healthcare regulators. In order…
Price discovery requires pricing some people out of the market. Period. There is no "free market" healthcare system that can or ever will deliver required health services to everyone. Furthermore when the alternative is death or debilitation, the price a "consumer" is willing to pay is effectively everything they possess and can borrow. That is both a massive distortion and non-optimal for the economy as a whole. The…
> Price discovery requires pricing some people out of the market. Period. There is no "free market" healthcare system that can or ever will deliver required health services to everyone.
There is no economic system that can deliver all of the health care to everyone who wants it.
Fundamentally, health care resources are limited: doctors, beds, MRI machines, etc.
Desire for health care is much less limited.
The question is not whether to give everyone what they want, but instead how to imperfectly ration what we have.
Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreeable until the last sentence: > Of course the problem is that the US is such a big country with huge immigration and scandinavian countries arent so it's always hard to compare. US Population: 325 million US Immigration: 1.5 million (2016) EU Population: 512 million EU Immigration: 2 million (2016) (taken from top Google results) It's fairly accurate to say that, compared to the US, the whole of EU has a "Scandi…
Scandinavia is different than the rest of europe and they dont have 11 million illegal immigrants too. Belive me i know both places pretty intimately.
How on earth can can i get downvoted for saying what is true?