Comment by diskcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diskcat | Hacker News Reader

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>"Move fast, break things" doesn't work when people's lives are at stake.

No matter what you do, people's lives are at stake. Even an app that suggests which restaurant to go for dinner could cause somebody to die by suggesting a restaurant in an area with higher rate of accidents.

The problem is how little consumers have control of when it comes to healthcare. We like to hand wave and pretend that the rules of economics don't apply when it comes to healthcare so instead of having a market where a person can shop for medicine, doctor's service, equipment etc. it all is more or less just close your eyes go in the tunnel and you will be taken care of and any issue of choice with regards to money is occluded by 'universal healthcare is a human right'.

If I could go to a hospital who would then give me a brochure of all the equipments they use and I find out one of their supplier is a dodgy companies that have dodgy equipments and terrible bug-handling practice I would go to another seller just as I would a smartphone that uses a dodgy processor that is known to break.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you fall a couple of sigma away from the typical customer for medical tests.

I would argue that most people, when they are already ill, do not want to have to perform life-or-death cost/benefit tradeoff analyses on highly technical accuracy data from the service provider who will perform their blood tests. They want to be assured that everyone in the market meets a basic standard of competency. We as a society have made a decision that we will pay more for our blood tests so that we don't have to do that homework for ourselves.

I do definitely think there is an opportunity for individuals to be better informed about the cost and quality of their health care, as long as it meets a basic standard.

As an analogy, the airline industry is able to be cutthroat-competitive on fares and routing, while still being highly regulated when it comes to safety. You can't choose to take a cheaper flight by agreeing to let the airline skip on oil changes.

Yes, ill people are a relatively captive audience.

This is a reason to force price transparency, not hand wave it away. Especially when the institutions in question have been granted exclusive local licenses for some equipment.

It would give people a chance to price shop when care isn't urgent. Lots of people would drive a couple of hours to take advantage of the hundreds of dollars of differences in prices for things like CT scans. This would normalize prices for people seeking urgent care! Of course, that would undermine the entire way we fund care in the US, but whatever.

I am all for price transparency in medical care. What I'm arguing is that there should be standardization of the quality of service that is being offered, so that customers are not put in the position of deciding how much measurement error they can afford to pay for.

You don't think there might be a certain information asymmetry between you and a medical care provider? And if there's not, why are you going to doctor at all?

Regulatory reasons. Even if there was pure info symmetry (a unicorn itself), I can't "prescribe" treatments for myself even to address well-known ailments, such as the case with anyone with a chronic disease or infection.

There is an information asymmetry when I buy an apple at the farmer market. That doesn't mean that every time I buy an apple I'm getting ripped off by the seller.

If you feel the value of your life/health is essentially comparable in gravity and scale to buying an apple at a farmer's market, your opinions on healthcare regulation are unlikely to be relevant to very many people.

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