U.S. Athletes Are Taking Full Advantage of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Athletes Are Taking Full Advantage of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village

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27 pointsZeroGravitas22 comments

It’s not as bad as Europe but in the USA it’s now 3-6 months to see a specialist with premium insurance

Depends a lot on where you are in the USA, what specialty you need, and how far you are willing to travel. There are definitely some areas without enough providers. We need to reform the way we train doctors.

In Canada the conservatives have been doing everything they can to gut the health care. One of their primary arguements is that it is so much quicker and easier to see a doctor in the US.

What has changed in the last few years(since they formulated their talking points) to add this delay?

A number of compounding factors.

Work conditions for providers aren’t great. Cost cutting has driven more work to providers without increasing pay.

Hospitals are constantly cutting provider costs and increasing overhead burden. So doctors that used to get 10 min per patient to write notes now get 5 and a couple additional patients. Nursing staff available is low and so doctors have to do more. All this adds up to more suck and doctors quitting earlier.

Higher health care needs due to aging population, that’s kind of a given.

Also general lack of providers coming down the pipeline. Needs are up but the number of doctors are roughly flat. It’s also not the ticket to a good life it used to be. You would make way more money as a tech bro than as a doctor and have better qol.

This wildly varies based on 1) needs, 2) supply/demand in your locale, 3) existing patient relationship.

I live in the Bay Area and in the past month - between myself, wife and three kids -- we've seen an oral surgeon, general practice dentist, orthodontist, pediatric cardiologist, pediatric orthopedist, OB/Gyn (for outpatient surgical procedure), pediatric dermatologist and a sports medicine orthopedist. The only one that had a lead time of more than a week was the dermatologist, and that was because it was a low priority assessment appointment, not something that required immediate attention.

Overall, lead times are pretty short for patients that need to be seem for emergent reasons, and I've almost never had issues with prescheduled appointments being moved after the fact. We have pretty standard employer-sponsored HDHP PPO insurance, and my experience has held true across three states over the past 20 years.

Unless something fundamentally changes about healthcare in the US, though, I believe high schools or colleges should teach "patient advocacy" for many of the same reasons as they should teach "financial literacy" as required short courses. I'm convinced, benefiting from having close family members employed as health care providers and witnessing the experiences of many friends & families who don't have this benefit of knowledge & experience, that many people receive supbar care primarily because they don't know how to seek & request what they need, to converse with providers using expected jargon, and to advocate for themselves to their insurers (and providers).

Too many people, not enough healthcare resources

It's funny because with healthcare the US it's actually making people see the price, a price in numbers, of healthcare when it's under a government monopoly.

In they EU they put caps everywhere so you can't know the price society is paying for not having a free market in healthcare (but also the EU has a tiny bit more free market in healthcare than the US anyway so)

Huh? You can get private insurance everywhere.

BUT. It can be computed, and economist have done so. The US free healthcare market, all agglomerated and counted for, actually cost more than the so called awful French Healthcare (despite the fact that it has been undermined by politicians with vested interests ...)

And we're not even talking about hidden costs when the labour get sick and contaminate their co-worker or when it takes more time to recover because labour has poorly treated.

Ideology is one thing, reality another. Some market are not meant to be free. Period.

Before you hold the US system in too high esteem for its price "transparency", consider the following:

* Often (perhaps most of the time), a hospital will be unwilling/unable to quote you a price for a procedure.

* Even if they do quote you a price, it's a BS price: every insurance provider negotiates their own prices for procedures.

   * To further illustrate this point: while working on software to bring visibility regarding lost income, prospective clients were downright indignant that early versions calculating loss figures using the prices in their own system were useless because the prices themselves were meaningless.

* There is significant administrative overhead on costs. Take this with a grain of salt, but I've heard there can be as many as 10 administrators for every doctor to handle dealing with thousands of insurance providers, potentially also spanning primary, secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary insurance for a given patient.

About half of the people in the US are on government -supplied medical insurance. That doesn't mean service is free for all those (though it is for quite a few), but it's not as bad as it was pre-obama care

Universal healthcare is great if you are part of the elite that gets to skip the inevitable lines. Canada and the UK systems require interminable waits in certain areas and for certain specialties.

It's, of course, better when the poors don't clog the system with their irrelevant health problems, right?

I got news for you- there are still long lines to get into the doctor's office in the US, especially in rural areas.

It's crazy how often people overlook this fact.

Not only are there lines in the US (terminating with an obscene and totally opaque bill), but the lines in most of the UK/EU-like systems can be avoided if you're willing to pay yourself.

Even in non-rural areas, you first have to narrow down providers that are in-network for your insurance and then it's still typically 4-8 weeks for the first appointment in any non-emergency scenario. US healthcare system is not some exception to long wait times for access.

So you can stay in line or go private to skip it. From my European POV, both paths are viable, but when you have "free" options, paid ones don't have exorbitant prices.

> but when you have "free" options, paid ones don't have exorbitant prices.

This is not my experience. Paid options in the UK are exorbitant, because there is almost no market for them. In my experience, it's cheaper to just fly somewhere with good medical tourism for the issue you are having than get it treated privately in the UK.

For the record, I still much prefer the UK system to the US system.

No one is comparing UK private insurance to Turkey or Vietnam. They're comparing US to UK, and yes, even private care to skip the lines in the UK is way cheaper than similar care in the US.

I'm an expat Brit, been living in the States for a decade and a half. I've been through the NHS for various more significant health things, and had family that have opted for private.

I don't think you grasp just how expensive private healthcare is in the US, even with an insurance policy. Private health care is so much cheaper in the UK. If you're saying it's much more expensive than Europe, maybe that'll give an idea how expensive it is to get sick in the US!

The US system is messed up beyond belief. One of the notable improvements recently has been the transparent pricing rule signed in to law a few years ago. So now I can see what things cost a bit more in advance, but I can't ever predict how much my insurance will actually choose to pay. Oh, and if it's inpatient, and I don't like the cost, well tough. I've really only got a couple of hospitals to choose from, and their prices are pretty much in sync, and only one of them is "in-network" for most procedures (meaning insurance wouldn't cover much at the other one)

I went public and private routes for a surgery last year, ended up with the NHS as the process was faster, additionally ended up getting a payment from my private insurance for going the public route.

I guess my 4 month wait for my annual physical (booked in June; first availability was October) in a city center didn't actually happen? Or is that normal for this paid healthcare system?

Here in New York it's about as bad too. Except a big chunk of people can't even get Healthcare.

The rich always get what they want.

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