Live data from Hacker News

Brave Care Has Closed

bravecare.com

91–100 of 160 posts

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 directl…

>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.

It's hard to do that without turning it into the NHS.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 directl…

> 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.

Linky?

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#93
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will still lose on the insurance front. If you’re on the exchange, you’ll get absolutely hammered by risk-adjustment. If you’re not, you’ll never be able to sell to anyone. You’ll have to lock up huge amounts of capital, which will grow as you grow, that you can’t invest or use. It will just sit in an account in case you can’t pay claims. You’ll have to accept horrible contracts with provider systems in order to…

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

Educate humans (not possible because they have to want to learn). Abolish Citizens United. Stop funding insurance. Put the insurance money to healthcare for all.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 directl…

That comparison has a lot of criticisms, for example:

https://bjgp.org/content/54/503/415

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#95
I have heard conflicting accounts of inefficiencies in the US healthcare system.

One account is that the US has too many medical facilities in urban areas. In other words, there might be five hospitals each with its own radiology equipment. That equipment is idle some of the time, so you could close some of the imaging departments and leave just one or two for the metro area. That would obviously inconvenience some people, but the gist of the criticism is that the US duplicates medical capacity for the sake of convenience.

The other criticism is that there are too few clinics and such. That's why there was a big push to open health clinics in pharmacies and urgent care locations recently.

Now I know these aren't mutually exclusive; you can have too few clinics and too many hospitals. But I would like to know if anyone is more informed than I am what validity there is to each criticism.

I'm curious what the truth is regarding the number and character of brick-and-mortar healthcare facilities in the US: too many? too few? Because it looks like this company was opening physical clinics.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#96
post #11
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... are you joking? Healthcare is one of the most regulated industries in the United States. Want to be a doctor? You've got the aptitude, the knowledge, the mindset, and the will, but a government-guaranteed cartel of medical schools won't let you in, so too damn bad. Learn to code. Want to open a clinic? You really only need about a half-million in hardware to operate at the level of a 1980s hospital, but regulator…

How come it's cheaper in places where everyone has insurance?

The problem is private insurance companies + private hospitals. They shouldn't exist.

Healthcare is an inelastic service: people will pay everything to get it. So private hospitals in a free market are pushed to bill their services as higher as possible. Actually, their prices would go to infinity, if not limited by people total savings and earnings.

So, here the insurance companies make the problem worse: they give people access to "infinite" credit. So you can pay for those exorbitant prices. But with insurance you just increased the pool of money people can use for health, so private hospitals can and will increase their pricing. Add more free market competition and you get the disaster of the USA healthcare system.

Because of that reason, basic economics, is that for profit Healthcare cannot work long term. The only way to make it work is making it a public service. But in USA politicians will cry that is comunism, so they won't do it.

And the USA Healthcare problem doesn't limit itself to USA. As americans are unable to pay for healthcare there, they started doing medical tourism, which is making health prices in other countries more expensive too.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

Didn't Jon Oliver do a bit on those review boards, pointing out how friendly to fellow doctors they generally are? I think when someone says that we need "a (federal) review board", I think they mean one that works, one with teeth.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#98
post #77

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.

That is interesting, although improbable.

Well my dentist is from Ukraine. I hope she doesn't go back.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#99

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.

Asking doctors about Kaiser will be an eye opening experience for you.

Re: Brave Care Has Closed

#100
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the market power is with the providers How does that work? Do the providers have cartels that set prices?

Yes. I don't know if that's the primary factor that gives them their market power; it might be even simpler than that. But yes, they absolutely do. Unless you're Kaiser, in which case you're the insurer and most of the providers, which is the whole idea behind Kaiser. But every other insurer --- and overwhelmingly, Americans aren't on Kaiser --- is beholden to providers. And of course, Kaiser competes with providers…

Then why isn’t everyone on Kaiser? Because they’re stupid?

Providers is also kind of vague. You show up at a hospital, does the nurse practitioner who does your intake set the price of your ER service? Who specifically sets the prices?

Post reply on HN