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The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

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Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#311

Post by herval »

lvl100 wrote: post #235
nyamada wrote: post #18

My daughter here in France had a bike accident two months ago which requires 14 stitches in her foot. We received 3 follow-up visits from nurses to clean and redress her wounds -- We pay about 100€ a month for supplemental private insurance on top of the public health insurance here -- Total cost for us? about 40€. We would have had to pay about 100€ more for the nurses' visits, but the mutuelle covered it. These are…

1) you’re right that social programs in EU is great but there’s a hidden cost. It’s all derived from centuries of imperialism/colonialism and the wealth accrued as a direct result. You’re effectively reaping the benefit (and this will likely persist for centuries more). 2) similarly, most drug developments and research are done in the US. EU is effectively leeching off of the US policies. I’d say even Japan by itself…

I regularly travel back to Brazil when I need to do something more involved that’s not an emergency, because the healthcare I get there is MUCH better than what I get in the US (I pay $800/y to keep a health insurance plan there). That’s one of the Third World Countries for you.

I have friends who also live in the US, and went through chemo and surgeries there. I did LASIK myself. None of us paid a dollar on top of the annual insurance, for any of it.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#312

Post by throwaway0a5e »

gus_massa wrote: post #241
boplicity wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really any healthcare procedure that is not typically covered by insurance has seen costs go down over time. Health "insurance" companies are incentivized to raise the cost of care. Why? Their profits are capped to a percentage of the cost of care. The only way for them to make more money is to have more revenue -- which they do by increasing the cost of care!

Bakeries are also incentivized to raise the cost of bread, in spite they have no official cape of the profit (unless you consider 100%?). The difference is that if a bakery tries to charge you a ridiculous price, you can politely decline tu buy, or buy and promise never to return.

And someone can start a competing bakery across the street that doesn't over charge. You can't do that with healthcare.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#313

Post by throwaway0a5e »

kcplate wrote: post #291
adnmcq999 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In just what century did you live here?

Definitely a common mindset, particularly of gen x and generations prior. I know I have it. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit if someone born and raised outside the us came away with this impression after living here for a while. Honestly when I read the headline my first thought was “six stitches? Crazy glue is cheaper…”

>Honestly when I read the headline my first thought was “six stitches? Crazy glue is cheaper”

Unless you live across the street from the hospital it's just less hassle to do it that way. Any injury not worthy of an ambulance can be cleaned, glued and taped in the time it would take to sit in the waiting room while they serve all the people who are dying faster.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#314

Post by refurb »

saiya-jin wrote: post #138
refurb wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plastic surgery and vision correction industries work pretty well in the US. You see price competition and patients have the ability to shop around and make choices that are important to them (references from other patients, doctor personality, etc). Now contrast that with going to a hospital for a procedure where you have time to shop around. Can you get a price? No. Can you easily get appointments with doctors…

Exactly the same situation is in rest of the world, no patient is shopping around. just goes usually to closest/biggest hospital. Yet we don't have this tragic mess US has. So its not about shopping around, rather some other reason like regulations, wrong dynamics between hospitals and insurances etc. You don't have better equipment nor doctors in US compared to biggest hospitals in Switzerland for example. Yet we ha…

Switzerland is #2 in per capita healthcare costs after the US. US is $11k per capita and Switzerland is $7k per capita.

Countries like Finland (4.2k) and New Zealand ($4.1k) show Switzerland could be doing way better.

Maybe the pot shouldn’t call the kettle black?

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#315

Post by toeget »

pietrovismara wrote: post #266
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are some of the reasons why my wife and I moved from the US to France -- she's French, I'm American; but I can't imagine returning to the nightmare complexity of billings and profiteering that the US system has become... I'm American and live in Norway. I feel the same. My out of pocket here is around $300, after which a lot of things simply become free. I don't have to consider whether or not I can afford to t…

> My taxes aren't higher than in the US: IN fact, they might be lower than taxes plus insurance premiums - and that doesn't even touch on the deductibles. I start to think that some people aren't really concerned by the amount they are paying. What they deplore is the idea that some "freeloader" could benefit from their taxes. Even if the net result is that they're spending less.

>What they deplore is the idea that some "freeloader" could benefit from their taxes.

But the ironic thing is that private insurance also works through "freeloading": you pay your premiums so that somebody else in the insurance pool can get treatment. It's just that some people prefer their intermediary be a private company which will also skim profits off top than their government.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#316

Post by throwaway09223 »

causi wrote: post #88
chongli wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US's non-paying contingent doesn't need to be any different from any other countries in order to cause the problem. The issue is that the uninsured subsidize the non-payers alone. This is radically different from countries with universal health care where the costs are spread among the entire tax-paying population. As for why the US spends more than any other country: it's due to an overabundance of caution among…

Do you have numbers for that? Even the comfortably insured in the US have to pay a fee when they visit a doctor, typically around $35 for GP and $100 or more for a specialist.

My last 5 insurers had copays between $0 and $20. Same price whether it's a specialist or primary care.

If it's an HMO, often it's just free entirely. PPO plans tend to have a small fee -- it's never been enough that I've given it a second thought -- and have wide coverage with few limits.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#317

Post by js2 »

jac241 wrote: post #220
js2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, Congress passed a bill that's supposed to help with surprise billing. The Biden administration has started to implement it, but doctors and their representatives (Democrats and Republicans alike) claim the administration is not implementing the bill as intended and they are favoring insurance companies over medical providers by trying to keep costs down. > “The Administration’s recently proposed regulation…

Those greedy doctors trying to protect their livelihoods from a bill that gives insurers an easy path to drive down their reimbursement when an alternate method of doing the same thing (New York's law on surprise billing) exists that does not have that same feature. I for one know that software engineers would certainly support bills that would reduce their pay for the greater good! Physicians are the only group that…

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/mobile/highest-paying.htm

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#318

Post by Jansen312 »

LinAGKar wrote: post #97
refurb wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plastic surgery and vision correction industries work pretty well in the US. You see price competition and patients have the ability to shop around and make choices that are important to them (references from other patients, doctor personality, etc). Now contrast that with going to a hospital for a procedure where you have time to shop around. Can you get a price? No. Can you easily get appointments with doctors…

>What’s the difference? The difference is that one is completely optional and you can spend as much time as you want comparing options, while the other you're forced to do on a whim at whatever place is closest. You can't shop around when you're bleeding out, as in the article. And such emergency health care constitutes most of these surprise bill situations.

Centralized hospital and clinics in certain locations. Don't allow building healthcare based on maximized spread. When there are multiple alternatives next to each other, it generates not just competition for customers (patients) but also doctors/nurses employments. Also build fully government subsidized hospitals in each of this location to force the private pricing not escalating. Then every hospital admins will need to undergo 6mths IRS audit. This force the job extremely undesirable and reduce the demand for it.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#319

Post by blntechie »

Semaphor wrote: post #259
blntechie wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distinctive thing I found in the US is that hospitals are always big and do everything under one roof. There are some smaller clinics run by chains in some states but they operate primarily only for insurance money and are not common. At the bottom of the chain, some doctors run their own operations from a strip mall like place but they again provide very minimal service. Meanwhile, in developing countries, it's not…

> Distinctive thing I found in the US is that hospitals are always big and do everything under one roof. It’s the same in Germany, so I’m not sure that actually is what makes things different.

Germany is public-private healthcare insurance driven healthcare model compared to the pure play private insurance or out-of-pocket driven healthcare model in the US and other poor countries. Germany has statutory public insurance while the examples I’m quoting including the US don’t have any such. For a private driven healthcare system, it’s strange there are no smaller, cheaper and nimble competitors.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#320

Post by dragonwriter »

blntechie wrote: post #319
Semaphor wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Distinctive thing I found in the US is that hospitals are always big and do everything under one roof. It’s the same in Germany, so I’m not sure that actually is what makes things different.

Germany is public-private healthcare insurance driven healthcare model compared to the pure play private insurance or out-of-pocket driven healthcare model in the US and other poor countries. Germany has statutory public insurance while the examples I’m quoting including the US don’t have any such. For a private driven healthcare system, it’s strange there are no smaller, cheaper and nimble competitors.

> the US and other poor countries.

the US is not a poor country, it is an astonishingly rich country whose elites want poor (and working-class more generally) people insecure so as to maximize the degree to which they can be exploited via economic coercion.

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