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Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

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Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#91

Post by showerst »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #64
showerst wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medicare/caid prices are standardized and public. They also release data on what specific hospitals bill for the most common procedures. http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Stat... Dealing with Medicare/caid involves lots of additional overhead and billing oversight, but that graf is a political shot, not a fact related to transparent pricing.

Isn't this a recent development, like two months ago? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/business/hospital-billing-...

The specific provider data is recent, but the 'here's what we'll reimburse for what procedures' data has always been public, as far as I know.

I think this is a link to it, but I'm not 100% sure - http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Medicare-Fee-for-Service-Payment...

Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#92

Post by badclient »

lettergram wrote: post #79
showerst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying my comment below. The government not only allows healthcare providers to reveal their prices, it encourages it. The graf about the government is a political statement, not a policy fact, and does not belong in a news story. ----- Medicare/caid prices are standardized and public. They also release data on what specific hospitals bill for the most common procedures. http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-a…

I worked in a billing office for 5 years, there are literally thousands of codes for EACH insurance company, again EACH insurance company. The reason the cost of healthcare is so high is because medicare pays roughly 15% of a bill, others are somewhere between 20-50% of a bill depending. That is to say if the doctor charges you $40,000 you pay your 10% co-pay of $4,000 and the insurance then only pays maybe another $…

Also, just so everyone knows, it's pretty easy to negotiate down your bill. The reason healthcare is so expensive is so many people don't pay it. If you are willing to pay say 40% of your bill it's already 25% better than medicare.

This. My Dad is a surgeon and the stories I hear are incredible. Once he operated on a child whose insurance was out of network. So the insurance company writes the parents a check to give to my father. Instead, the parents decide to cash it and never pay for the surgery. So, the parents literally make a few thousand bucks from having their child operated instead of paying that.

Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#93

Post by lostlogin »

rayiner wrote: post #43
crusso wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free market in medicine is plain weird Says you. Time and again, Lasik surgery and cosmetic surgeries not covered by insurance or hindered by over-regulation have shown us that transparent pricing and competition work to make those procedures more affordable -- just like these forces work in other markets. The State has perverted the medical market for more than half a century and you're just used to seeing it in…

I'd look at good old supply and demand before reaching for "over-regulating is distorting the market." Demand for Lasik and cosmetic surgery is much more elastic because they're not life-saving or otherwise necessary procedures. Meanwhile, supply is relatively higher because they're relatively cheap procedures to provide. They can be done in outpatient centers instead of hospitals, usually don't require general anest…

Medicine doesn't really follow supply and demand. If you install more CT or MRI scanners, you do more scanning. Demand follows supply. This is not helped by it only rarely being the patient who pays directly (usually insurance or taxpayer). People tend to do what their doctors suggest and go where their doctors say to go. There was a great article on this I read about a year ago. I thought it was in the Economist, but can't find it. Wikipedia is the best I can find sorry. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplier-induced_demand

Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#94

Post by refurb »

jljljl wrote: post #50
crusso wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free market in medicine is plain weird Says you. Time and again, Lasik surgery and cosmetic surgeries not covered by insurance or hindered by over-regulation have shown us that transparent pricing and competition work to make those procedures more affordable -- just like these forces work in other markets. The State has perverted the medical market for more than half a century and you're just used to seeing it in…

Neither Lasik nor cosmetic surgeries tend to be major issues of life and death, nor do they tend to occur in emergency situations where an informed decision may not be possible. Free markets and transparent pricing that work require that there not be major information asymmetries between supplier and purchaser. If I'm in the hospital with an emergency or critical condition, I probably don't have the option of fully r…

You don't think people with cancer research which clinic to go to? I know if I had cancer I dam well would.

Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#95

Post by rogerbinns »

pdx wrote: post #45
showerst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying my comment below. The government not only allows healthcare providers to reveal their prices, it encourages it. The graf about the government is a political statement, not a policy fact, and does not belong in a news story. ----- Medicare/caid prices are standardized and public. They also release data on what specific hospitals bill for the most common procedures. http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-a…

Pricing transparency, for whatever reason, does not exist as a rule in the medical industry. The "charge masters", are a joke that the hospitals themselves admit are useless as indicators of actual prices paid unless you're out of pocket, and then you get to pay them. Even then, the charge masters, as useless as they are, are still kept well hidden from all but the most inquisitive. I hope you're right about the gove…

Even getting lab work done is ridiculous. There isn't any discretion, risk, variability or uncertainty involved. A cholesterol test is a cholesterol test. I needed a bunch of tests a while back and pay for them myself. The labs don't put their prices online - you have to call. And then you have to talk to multiple departments because they just aren't setup to tell you pricing and require fragments of information from other departments. Astonishingly I did eventually find somewhere that posted prices, and they turned out to be a quarter of what would have been charged from the regular lab.

I wrote more about it here https://plus.google.com/110166527124367568225/posts/eiThZXx7...

Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#96

Post by refurb »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #9
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this is of course due to political circumstances: medicine is just too profitable. No. Medicine in inelastic. There is no such thing as a rational demand side, as you don't get to choose if you need healthcare or not. When demand is inelastic, and supply is limited, prices will rise accordingly with no relief in sight. The solution? Either set market prices (at the cost of stifling supply) or flood the market wit…

How do you explain the fact that healthcare expenditures in the US are twice as high as in the rest of the Western world, and life expectancy is comparable?

Life expectancy is a terrible proxy for quality of healthcare delivered.

For example, if you eliminate traffic accidents (of which the US has many due to it's low density), US life expectancy is near the top globally.

Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#97

Post by ceol »

ahallock wrote: post #51
toomuchtodo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine. Sure, you bump your head or get a sore throat, you walk it off. What happens when you try to "walk off" something you think is minor, and you're in the ER 24-72 hours later? Hello $20K-$50K bill. My wife and I were in a car accident a year ago (someone turned in front of us while we were doing 40mph). My wife required an ambulance for transportation due to damage to her right foot. The ambulance didn't exactly…

That's what insurance is for. Catastrophic situations. Or perhaps there's a way to pre-purchase emergency care at a discount. Or you set your emergency provider ahead of time based on price. I don't know. There must be creative ways to solve this problem rather than being all fatalist about it.

Most of those "creative solutions" are made by people who, to be frank, really have no idea what they're talking about.

If I get into a car accident, or if my intestine ruptures, do you think I want the person on the other end of 911 to have to deal with which ambulance provider I picked out or which ER I have on my list of approved locations? No. I want the closest ambulance to take me to the closest ER, and I want the first doctor available to take a look at me. Then, if need be, I want the first ER room open.

Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#99

Post by commandar »

lettergram wrote: post #79
showerst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying my comment below. The government not only allows healthcare providers to reveal their prices, it encourages it. The graf about the government is a political statement, not a policy fact, and does not belong in a news story. ----- Medicare/caid prices are standardized and public. They also release data on what specific hospitals bill for the most common procedures. http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-a…

I worked in a billing office for 5 years, there are literally thousands of codes for EACH insurance company, again EACH insurance company. The reason the cost of healthcare is so high is because medicare pays roughly 15% of a bill, others are somewhere between 20-50% of a bill depending. That is to say if the doctor charges you $40,000 you pay your 10% co-pay of $4,000 and the insurance then only pays maybe another $…

Yeah, I work at a ~400 bed not-for-profit hospital. One of the culture shocks when I started working here was learning that we have an entire department whose sole job is figuring out what billing codes to send insurance companies so that the hospital gets paid for its services.

From everything I've seen, it's a very difficult job, and any mistake -- or not even a mistake per se, just coding something in a way that disagrees with the particular quirks of a given insurance company -- can have a drastic impact on whether and how much we actually get paid for a particular line item on a bill.

Re: Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

#100

Post by rthomas6 »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #25
ambiate wrote: post #14

I dream of a day when I can walk into an area which offers 'services' and be offered a pricing chart. From hospitals, banks, loan officers, home loans, cars, etc. A cryptic itemized list, such as a mortgage's Good Faith Estimate (GFE), which falls short of describing the items in the list still fails my test. This hope is not for me. Its for the misfortunate who run on impulse and have weak mathematical logic. Many p…

> I dream of a day when I can walk into an area which offers 'services' and be offered a pricing chart. I don't want to be offered a pricing chart when I have a kidney stone or get violently mugged. When that happens I don't want to have to deal with that sort of thing. The free market in medicine is plain weird. Everyone needs the doctor on occasion, and everyone needs tyres on their car. Both things are pretty stan…

I see commercials for tires all the time. Michelin, Goodyear, and Firestone, all saying how their tire is the best. I also see a lot of commercials for places like Aamco, National Tire and Battery, and Just Brakes, saying they have the best prices for tires.
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