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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

I think the ridiculous thing here is not the doctor charging but that all insurance doesn't cover it.

I bet there are a ton of consultants and lawyers (and maybe some accountants) on HN and most of them will charge you for time spent replying to emails.

Edit: inserted the word "all" before insurance to clarify my intent.

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from TFA:

> Health plans covered the full cost of about 82% of claims, according to the Peterson-KFF analysis. Patients who shared the cost paid $25 on average.

I would be very curious to know if my insurance is paying for the useless messages that my doctor's office sends. I sure hope not — they are next to worthless!

Regardless of if you feel they are worthless, IMO, the people who create them should not be asked to work for free. I've never found the notes from mine to be "worthless", you may want to find a new doctor.

Also, your TFA is kind of unnecessarily vulgar (You do know what the F in TFA is for?) here seeing as it doesn't change the point of my original comment. I did, however, add the word "all" incase someone took my comment to read that I didn't think any insurance covered it.

> I've never found the notes from mine to be "worthless", you may want to find a new doctor.

Thanks for the thought, but unfortunately our whole system (Stanford Health Care, FWIW) is like this. My doctor is better than my kids' doctor, and my wife's doctor. The incentives are just not there for them to engage, so mostly I get nurse messages that are useless. It appears to be a copy/paste from google (or some internal system), basically.

As for "TFA", I do know what it means and see it used here regularly [1] and without meaning anything harsh. It's not like some people say "TA" and some people say "TFA". It's just TFA. Regardless, I didn't meant to offend you or make it seem like I was demeaning you. I was just pointing out that the article addressed your complaint, and indicated that the vast majority of insurance plans don't leave the cost up to the patient. I nonetheless appreciate your feedback and will consider "TFA" more carefully in the future. If you have any equally pithy alternatives, I would welcome them!

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=tfa

Maybe there would be an incentive for them to engage if they were getting paid for it... granted there would also need to be an incentive for them to not abuse it. But that's already an issue, for example: I had a dentist who would routinely recommend procedures I didn't need.

I know a few primary care doctors and they are all overworked and overbooked. I can't imagine any of them going above an beyond unfortunately (not because they don't want to but because they don't have the time). But most of the one's I know hate the system too.

I appreciate the clarification on tone. As a dev I read TFA in the same time as RTFM (as in: why didn't you read the article you moron?). But I get your usage as well.

I would think that there are very few scenarios where an email isn't cheaper than the alternative.

I would guess that fully covering patient emails would save insurance companies money in the long run, but why do that when you can boost short-term profits?

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