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Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

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Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#451

Post by consumer451 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #395
JamesBarney wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder though how much this drives up the cost. Because obesity also drives down lifespan, and age has a huge impact on healthcare expenditures.

Obesity, like smoking, is one of those morbidities that lower lifetime healthcare costs significantly, as most costs are incurred in old age, as you saisd. Obesity, smoking, etc can kill before reaching an age where people start incurring high costs.

There is a lovely tale from Czech Republic in 2001 where Philip Morris was distributing analysis showing the economic benefits of smoking to their shared healthcare pool.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB995230746855683470

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#452

Post by kasey_junk »

pessimizer wrote: post #412
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming the US healthcare system isn't equally underfunded. The US has massive doctors shortages (especially in rural areas), and that's not counting all the care the US just doesn't do because people instead just die since they can't afford to go to the hospital.

> You're assuming the US healthcare system isn't equally underfunded. You don't have to assume. It costs twice as much as the most expensive health systems on earth, but delivers Afghanistan-level life expectancies. The problem isn't that we're spending too little.

If you are going to use life expectancy you should at least not use hyperbole to compare. It would be fair to claim the US spends the most on earth but only gets Polish levels of life expectancy.

Afghanistan is a whole decade off that cohort.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#453

Post by nojito »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #437
nojito wrote: post #14

This data is already available cleaned here. https://turquoise.health/

Those are hospitals' cash prices, not the negotiated rates with insurance companies.

No they have everything.

https://turquoise.health/researchers

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#455

Post by kasey_junk »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #432
jaarse wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a Canadian, and I would never want to give up our single payer system. That being said, Canada has a huge health care problem right now. Frequently they need to close emergency services in major (& minor) cities at night due to staff shortages. The wait times for basic diagnostics is on the order of months (not days or weeks). For example, a relative of mine has lost 90 pounds since the start of the year, complai…

> The wait times for basic diagnostics is on the order of months (not days or weeks). The crazy thing to me about this is, most Americans simply skip medical procedures, or tests due to cost. So American wait times aren't lower because their hospitals are better, they just server a much smaller pool of people due to so many being priced out of being healthy. And honestly, the longer you go without doctor visits, more…

“Most” Americans do not skip procedures due to cost. About 1/3 have (https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/americans-chall...) and that is mostly dental procedures.

That is an atrocious number and something that needs fixing but we don’t need to exaggerate it to make that true.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#456

Post by JAA1337 »

duffpkg wrote: post #70

I'm author of Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly, 20 year health system executive, blah, blah. It's very easy for people to forget the scale of the US "health system", we are talking 1/5, maybe more, of the entire US economy. If US healthcare spending were a country, it would have the third largest GDP in the world. Accidents of history and the massive federal beauracracy created the crazy monster of ICD/CPT codes that…

In a vacuum ...

It does not seem reasonable that 20% of a countries economy is spent on health care.

Just as it doesn't seem reasonable for the cost of healthcare to be ~12% of the household income for a family (third highest living expense).

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#457

Post by t0mas88 »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #140
e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider the amount that the US spends per capita on healthcare relative to other countries for the same standard of care a "failure" of the healthcare industry? Or is there some other reason healthcare "just costs more" here? Also wondering what you think a solution is - single-payer for better and simpler price negotiations, or some other approach? My main concern is if we're spending 20% of GDP on something…

Number one is full price transparency of the whole chain. I work for a medical device company and even the marketing people can't really tell what our stuff costs. There are a ton of middlemen with obscure contracts and very high markups. My ex got one of our devices and I was told by our people that the hospital should have received the device for between 20k-30k (nobody seems to really know) and the hospital charge…

The prices as charged in the US regularly make it onto Twitter and Reddit etc where us Europeans wonder how on earth it's possible that something in the US costs $ 800 which is charged at less than $ 100 over here (and then paid by insurance). Same for that $ 30k device being sold for $ 80k.

What we all forget is that nobody is actually paying the US healthcare invoices.

Roughly two options... 1. You have insurance and they negotiated a different (much lower) rate or 2. you don't have insurance and can't pay the amount on the invoice.

In option 2 you either declare bankruptcy and they get nothing or they sell the claim for something like 20% of the invoice to a collections agency.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#458

Post by robertlagrant »

nuclearnice1 wrote: post #443
robertlagrant wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no point pretending you know what people's motivations are. Conservatives I've read/heard seem to generally want similar outcomes, but disagree drastically on the methods.

First sentence: don’t guess people’s motivations Second sentence: explain people’s motivations

No, that's a category error. I'm not talking about every conservative. Just the ones I've listened to explain themselves.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#459

Post by spaetzleesser »

t0mas88 wrote: post #457
spaetzleesser wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number one is full price transparency of the whole chain. I work for a medical device company and even the marketing people can't really tell what our stuff costs. There are a ton of middlemen with obscure contracts and very high markups. My ex got one of our devices and I was told by our people that the hospital should have received the device for between 20k-30k (nobody seems to really know) and the hospital charge…

The prices as charged in the US regularly make it onto Twitter and Reddit etc where us Europeans wonder how on earth it's possible that something in the US costs $ 800 which is charged at less than $ 100 over here (and then paid by insurance). Same for that $ 30k device being sold for $ 80k. What we all forget is that nobody is actually paying the US healthcare invoices. Roughly two options... 1. You have insurance a…

Not correct. The insurance paid 80k for the device and 300k total for the surgery after one year of fighting almost daily.

Also: if you make a certain amount of money and they hit you with a 100k bill you can't just declare bankruptcy. The court won't allow you to do it because you make too much money.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#460

Post by hpkuarg »

c7b wrote: post #448
duffpkg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare is such a base layer of the economy, I find comparisons to be extraordinaly difficult between countries. On the most basic level our pathway to becoming a healthcare provider of all sorts is dramatically more expensive and limited than other countries, what healthcare providers are paid is dramatically more than other countries, we invest many times per capita what other countries put into basic medical re…

> our patient population is very different from other countries > our expectations are very different from other countries > our scale is dramatically different than other countries > the way are population is taxed is very different than other countries do you have evidence to support these claims? what makes the US patient population or their expectations or the US taxation system unique in the world?

Not the OP, but Americans as a whole are very unhealthy (with 42% of the population being obese and over two-thirds being overweight) and culturally have very high expectations of what medicine can do for them, as opposed to making difficult changes to their lifestyle.

A part of the latter is based on the actual superiority of the quality of medical care in this country -- due to the high levels of wealth produced by this (mostly market-oriented) economy and advanced medical technology, doctors can in fact perform miracles here that they cannot elsewhere.

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