> hospital price transparency,
Wasn't this already put in place by the previous administration?
Wasn't this already put in place by the previous administration?
There is no price transparency. Sure would like it since I have a high deductible plan.
Health insurance is supposed to cover you for catastrophic health issues that were previously unknown. For some reason it changed to also cover all your recurring or minor illnesses.
There is fairly strong evidence that if the cost of routine preventative care isn’t paid by insurance, quite a lot of people opt to skip it because they can’t afford it, leading to worse outcomes.
Do you have evidence of this part specifically? Because the Oregon Experiment found no improvement in health outcomes in a large randomized trial of low-income recipients of Medicaid. (Partly because their health was generally good in the first place.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experim...
While they credit the ACA with saving their life, had we had some form of socialized medicine from the start, this likely would've been caught much earlier, treated much more easily, and with significantly less long term effects.
I couldn't easily find studies on preventative care leading to better outcomes, but given how many diseases (like cancer for example) can go from easily treatable to a catastrophic nightmare depending on how early they are detected, I find it hard to believe that easy, cheap (or free) access screenings would have no effect on outcomes, though I realize how treacherous it can be to rely on instinct instead of data.
It did show an improvement is psychological outcomes, I presume due to peace of mind, because their wasn’t a corresponding increase in psychiatric medication.
It is part of large complicated model. If it was their entire model they wouldn't be operating medical offices and hospitals. It is the whole package that helps them control costs.
From this, I derived the argument that routine checkups are a *major* component of Kaiser’s system, to the point that, given the flow of discussion, I felt it appropriate to call it “their whole model”. I’m sorry my hyperbole was too far.
Well that and with Kaiser it's a lot easier to tell who is in network (they never commingle in and out of network care).
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
Many people simply aren’t capable of shopping around, either: emergency care, cognitive impairments, limited geographic options, and the conflicts of interest inherent to for-profit medicine all make it hard for people to know what they need and whether it’s worth the money. As with preventative care, making it harder to get treatment is certain to lead to many people not getting problems treated prior to them becoming major.
Look at it from an economic incentive standpoint: Americans pay 2-3 times more for the same service. That is a huge amount of money, and it ensures that rooms full of smart people will be working to ensure that their employers continue to get it.
Hospitals have zero incentive to be transparent, and all the incentives to be opaque. So long as you’re a non-Medicare/Medicaid patient you’ll continue to suffer.
The American healthcare system is completely fucked (there’s no better word).
It's an underappreciated point. The US healthcare system is one of the largest wealth transfer systems ever invented. It's a heavily protected cartel that plunders wealth from the top 2/3 and lines the pockets of a few million employees in the system.
There is an excess cost bounty of $1.2 trillion (or more) being plundered and redistributed every year to the healthcare cartel.
There are millions of people working artificially high paying jobs in the healthcare cartel in the US courtesy of the hyper inflated costs in the system. From nurses to doctors to pharma sales reps to scientists to management and everything inbetween.
Nobody ever talks about the need to slash the pay of nurses & doctors though, it's far too unpopular of a subject, it's downright taboo. Just a notch below slashing the pay of teachers. They'd all go on strike tomorrow morning if a serious attempt were made to bring their pay in-line with other developed nations.
The US has to remove a minimum of $1.2 trillion in cost from its healthcare system (which would produce an end cost structure still far above that of eg Britain). Only about 10-15% of that can come from slashing costs out of the pharma drug price side. The bulk of it has to come out of inflated salaries of millions of workers in healthcare across the board.
When politicians talk about universal healthcare in the US, they always, without exception, go far out of their way to dodge this epic scale problem of inflated salaries in healthcare and of where to find $1.2 trillion in costs to slash (they primarily focus on high drug prices as a matter of political convenience; that segment by itself won't remotely cut it though). This is why every time a state decides it's going to look at doing universal healthcare, it immediately runs away after the cost study is completed, it's impossible until you remove a dramatic amount of cost from the system. Now someone go tell all the nurses and doctors in California they get to make 25%-35% less money (good luck).
Studies like this [1] led me to believe that massive rises in administration costs and inefficiencies due to insurance structure are bigger culprits than doctor/nurse salaries. But I am admittedly not very well informed in this area.
The people mentioned specifically in the comment are of more concern; sales, admin, etc. salaries in this field are also inflated compared to other industries.
There would be some overhead for single payer but it would be much more efficient and simple.
Massive insurance company dissolution might also be an unpopular reality for folks to come to terms with as well though
Did you know that hospitals make money by using name brand medications? They will get a contract with a brand, like Motrin, and charge you full price at $8 a pill. Then Motrin will will evaluate how much the hospital used and give them a big rebate to bring the hospital's cost down under $1 per pill. You can literally buy a bottle of ibuprofen for what they charge for a single pill, but of course in the name of safety (and really kickbacks too) they won't allow the cheaper outside medication. It's effectively an internal monopoly.