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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

They don't! It's a huge problem! It's probably the problem in US health care, which, despite my own belief that single-payer is bad policy, is in fact a total shitshow.

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I think there's also the gamified confusion of over how much goes to the physician versus how much goes to administrating orgs and liability coverage.

We have numbers for this, we don't need to derive them axiomatically. Practitioner compensation is the largest component of health provider spending. Liability coverage is the second largest component of admin spending, which is 25% of provider spending.

“We have numbers” is always refreshing, especially in a shell game. Cost of all licensed medical practitioners? Or overweighting incomes of outlier CEO physicians? 25% is a steep tax on health in any case.

At the point where you're just dismissing the CMS NHE, you're well into the terrain of unfalsifiability.

Fair enough, but it is a political topic, and there are different and more confusing slices of the healthcare system exposed to patients than org spending breakdowns. Not sure how many of this thread's comments could hold water if falsification were universally applied.

Just so that people reading this thread know that there is the medical expense version of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it lives inside Medicare (CMS), and it publishes data. Most things people are trying to derive axiomatically on this thread, you can just look up.

It's really easy now with Claude and GPT5; just ask them a question and tell them to answer it for you, with cites, from the NHE. (The data I argue from precedes widespread LLM research; I built a site for this a couple years ago and didn't bother to update my data, because I assume it didn't get much better.)

Claude, gpt, and ai in general still hallucinate. What data do you argue from and please cite your source.

Still no sources cited

Thomas is not hallucinating.

Still haven’t seen any sources or links, I do want to read up on it but never find proper sources other then “llm:”.

No, he mentioned it. Here’s a link:

https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

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