We also need to start acknowledging most medical care is urgent and not a choice.
Happy to see some movement on at least price transparency though.
Happy to see some movement on at least price transparency though.
Thus the ability to "shop around" and thus subjectivity of medical care to price competition definitely exists in the majority of cases. If the system were setup to incentivize and support this. But due to lack of price transparency and skin in the game, there is no competitive pressure on pricing in practice.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2013/oct/28/nick-gille...
Most health insured patients can "shop around" in their network, which is a list of pre-negotiated priced providers that the insurance company has approved. Providers that are already vetted to be the lower cost for insurance, created through purchase power. And that's assuming it isn't an HMO, for which there is no shopping around.
There are not enough options for real market competition in healthcare.
There are obvious flaws in the healthcare system that are apparent from first principles. No need to blindly copy others.
Removing incentives for people to use the system efficiently leads to poor outcomes in different ways
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Believe it or not, you were raised by American education to believe this is the best country in the world. Take some trips, you'll change your mind if you get out into the world.
It's wild to me how folks will continue to support the predatory healthcare industry here.
Through competitive pressures which drive down cost and encourage increases in quality.
There is very little competitive pressure in healthcare from the consumer due to the issues already mentioned above
In fact, I think you'll find most of healthcare has already been captured by private equity, resulting in worse outcomes for the both doctors and patients.
Protectionism limiting the number of doctors inflates wages, lack of price transparency removes ability to comparison shop, max out of pocket plans remove incentives to consider cost in care. All of these are easy to solve once they're identified and understood as problems.
When you look at disciplines where pricing is transparent and insurance isn't generally involved, like cosmetics/plastic surgery, the costs are quite cheap. Because it actually acts as a competitive market with incentive for consumers to comparison shop
Or maybe. . . maybe you're talking out your ass.
https://us-uk.bookimed.com/article/where-to-get-cheap-plasti...
If you're not going to bother to be right about that, I can't take you seriously saying that our situation is trivial to solve, but that also the solutions that work in other countries won't work here. Call be crazy.
The problem with this legislation is that prices at one hospital are only useful in comparison to another hospital’s prices. Since the law doesn’t provide a facility for comparison, even the compliant hospital’s data is nearly useless. There needs to be a centralized database with compatible definitions for each procedure that allows consumers not just to see the prices, but to directly compare them.
Are you saying the majority of patient-practitioner encounters are emergency visits, or that the majority of spending is on emergency care, or something else?
But the biggest bills are probably near end-of-life, and mostly not emergency care.
We should also acknowledge that it costs money to deliver and we live in a resource constrained world.
I know the ship has sailed on this but it I continue to see people truly believe that they are not paying for health care and that sort of misguided understanding of economics shouldn't be encouraged as it makes it difficult to have coherent discussions about many different public policies.
College education should be free...
College loans should be free (even when they weren't when the loan was taken out)...
Income should be free (UBI schemes)...
It seems it's only with healthcare people forget the meaning of the word.
If you have to go to the hospital, that’s not billed to you.
If you see your GP, they charge you up front. There’s no copay as in the US system, the doctor just charges what they want. The doctor doesn’t keep any significant medicine on prem. If you need a vaccine, they write a script that you take to the pharmacy and return with. In either case, you submit your paperwork after the fact and get reimbursed. For office visits it’s 80% of the “reasonable and customary” changes. For medicine it’s usually 50-60%.
You can purchase additional insurance that covers more of these costs, but I didn’t see any value in it for my situation.
When I left, French insurance companies were setting up US style networks with doctors. If you saw an in-network provider, you were reimbursed more.
Only the truly indigent get “free” healthcare under the French system.
So my local hospital just does whatever and charges Medicare their CAH rates, doesn't matter a lot if they suck or could be cheaper, no one else can open a hospital (both by state law and because Medicare probably wouldn't agree to pay them).