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Brave Care Has Closed

bravecare.com

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Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#81

Post by thrance »

anovikov wrote: post #72

Real way to fix healthcare: facilities based on repurposed container ships offshore near cities with lots of flights into them, to be outside of US regulations, staffed by physicians shuffled from Eastern Europe. Will offer more than an order of magnitude price advantage and will quickly squeeze the existing systems making it irrelevant until what's left of it is forced to change.

This seems extremely carbon intensive and would starve eastern Europe of the medical staff it probably needs. Also why would they charge an order of magnitude less when a 3% discount would be enough to attract patients? And how could a brain surgeon do his thing on a boat? This just seems comically bad.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#82

Post by toast0 »

blindriver wrote: post #66
noitpmeder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the path forward? Where do we go from here?

Dump $1 trillion into Kaiser and push it out to all 50 states. I have it in Bay Area and it’s mostly been great for me. It’s not the best but it also gets 90% of things right.

Kaiser is the one thing I miss the most having left the Bay Area. It has sort of moved in here, but it took over an existing group and afaik, it's not really integrated like it was down there; there's no Kaiser hospitals here, so hospital care is going to be a mess, and I'm not sure if they have pharmacies either.

But, a lot of people don't like Kaiser. You have to be ok with getting good enough care, and not really be trying to seek 'the best' care. Integration is so nice though. I'm sure Kaiser never puts you in the situation where the Dr says I'm not sure which drug will be covered, let's try A, the pharmacist says A isn't covered, ask your Dr to write a script for B, and your Dr doesn't answer the phone so you have to decide to either pay $250 for A or wait over the weekend to start your kid's treatment.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#83

Post by thrance »

missedthecue wrote: post #63
llamaimperative wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth We get a lot more care, pay higher rates, and have worse outcomes. That last bit is why people are pissed.

I don't think it's settled fact that the US has worse health outcomes. In fact, most data I see points to the opposite. Some people point out very lazy metrics like life expectancy while ignoring that 72% of Americans are overweight or obese according to the CDC. Rearrange healthcare/government insurance models all you want; it can't fix that.

Life expectancy is still lower in the US than in western Europe.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#84

Post by jimmymcgee73 »

tptacek wrote: post #76
inferiorhuman wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the last time this came up I posted the CMS handbook. If Medicare operated the way you falsely claim there would be an outcry similar to that over BCBS's behavior. BCBS was proposing something entirely different from how Medicare operates.

Clearly not, because this is how Medicare operates. In fact, it's the whole premise for why Medicare is meant to bring prices down!

I am an anesthesiologist. This is false. We bill 1 unit every 15 minutes, and then we receive startup units on top. A gall bladder removal is 7 units and often takes an hour. So we would receive 11 units for that hour. If it takes 2 hours we would get 15 units. If it takes 3 hours we would get 19 units.

There is no cap for billing, but realize when an operation goes long it not only means we make less per hour, but there is also usually a good reason for that. Even if there isn’t a good reason, it’s not like we have control over how fast a surgeon operates.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#85

Post by yieldcrv »

nextworddev wrote: post #34

Zombie startups closing shop around year end for tax purposes I guess

VC tax loss harvesting? They need proof to mark down their investment to zero?

Most taxpayers have to realize the loss to take a tax deduction against their gains, but some tax elections allow you to do the same without finding a buyer for the worthless shares, which narrows down the incentives

Mark to Market election

as well as non-profits

some non-profit investors have stricter scrutiny as their charitable distribution requirement is based on net assets. so there is an incentive to arbitrarily mark malperforming investments down to lower values, but being able to get the business to announce their failure supports it better

Just thinking out loud

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#86

Post by fl0id »

dgfitz wrote: post #29
sam0x17 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mindset (that it will be a goldrush) is why we can't have nice things. Can't trust capitalism to do this kind of stuff in a non-exploitative way

We don’t have nice things because congress sucks. Keep Blaming capitalism, that wall has lots of screams to bear yet.

Two things can be true. Especially if they are at least partially connected.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#87

Post by basementcat »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #64
noitpmeder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the path forward? Where do we go from here?

So my four pigs analogy, where insurance companies, drug/device companies, doctors/hospitals, and lawyers all feed at the trough, increase costs and point to someone else (although I will admit lawyers are probably the smallest cost component and the most blamed by the other three). There is a fifth one that imposes costs: our comprehensively unhealthy food, health, and lifestyle in America that capitalism feeds upon…

> reform the FDA to make bringing drugs to market cheaper.

We recently tried this with some vaccines and now a large segment of the population is now vaccine-hesitant.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10257562/

> Lawyers: caps caps caps so there isn’t costly malpractice insurance.

Caps don’t always result in improved health outcomes.

https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?p...

> Maybe would also necessitate a federal review board to weed out "bad doctors".

This exists; each state medical board has a procedure for reviewing medical licenses.

https://www.mbc.ca.gov/

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#88

Post by [deleted] »

blindriver wrote: post #66
noitpmeder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the path forward? Where do we go from here?

Dump $1 trillion into Kaiser and push it out to all 50 states. I have it in Bay Area and it’s mostly been great for me. It’s not the best but it also gets 90% of things right.

[deleted]

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#89

Post by forgetfreeman »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #64
noitpmeder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the path forward? Where do we go from here?

So my four pigs analogy, where insurance companies, drug/device companies, doctors/hospitals, and lawyers all feed at the trough, increase costs and point to someone else (although I will admit lawyers are probably the smallest cost component and the most blamed by the other three). There is a fifth one that imposes costs: our comprehensively unhealthy food, health, and lifestyle in America that capitalism feeds upon…

> reform the FDA to make bringing drugs to market cheaper.

Uh, definitely not. The drug discovery and trial process is every bit as complex and expensive as it is for a reason. If you're serious about lowering the cost of getting compounds through the pipeline the first thing that should go is private equity's growing chokehold on the provider practices that perform clinical studies.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#90

Post by asadotzler »

blindriver wrote: post #66
noitpmeder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the path forward? Where do we go from here?

Dump $1 trillion into Kaiser and push it out to all 50 states. I have it in Bay Area and it’s mostly been great for me. It’s not the best but it also gets 90% of things right.

There was a study comparing Kaiser Permanente with the UK's National Health Service (NHS) that found Kaiser achieved better performance at roughly the same cost.

If we could use tax dollars to make Kaiser national, and scale that large without losing the efficiency and results, we'd be in darned good shape.

Eliminate other private health insurance and if people want above and beyond service they can negotiate directly with providers and pay out of pocket for that.

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