Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | Hacker News Reader

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

healthland.time.com

33 pointsnarad10 comments

One of the most frustrating pains I have in life is that when I visit the doctor / dentist, even with insurance, it's difficult for me to understand exactly how much I'll end up paying and whether or not it's reasonable. It's difficult to comparison shop doctors, since pricing information is not published, and complicated to calculate what is/isn't covered.

I'm interested in finding (or building) a platform that can tell me 1) how much a particular procedure would cost me with my insurance plan and 2) whether the price the doctor is going to charge me is reasonable. I think the former could come from publicly available coverage policies of all major payers/plans and the latter could come from user/community input (similar to Glassdoor).

Does anyone know if something like this exists?

Yesterday's discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5256808

Singapore's model needs to be studied more closely. A mandatory savings plan for catastraphic insurance plus consumers spending for their own health care. I don't know the details but there is a decent amount of literature: http://blog.jparsons.net/2009/08/why-singapores-health-care-...

When I hear about the overinflated cost of medicine I can't help but think of ties to the overinflated cost of education. While I believe in paying specialized, skilled laborers a rate commensurate with the value they provide, pretty much every med school grad I've ever known (specialized or not) shrugs at the notion of graduating with upwards of $250k+ in debt like it's this inescapable force of nature. They know how the system works, and they'll make it up soon. But therein lies the problem, as the costs of that $250k loan are already baked into inflated salaries across the board.

If there's a financial disincentive (aside from just greed) to drive down costs of care because you're looking at so much debt right out of the gate, it doesn't set much of a precedent to look for cheaper alternatives.

State schools are relatively cheap, community college is really cheap, and public high school is free. If you can prove a need, you can go to your state's top state school for borderline free (I have a friend who was paid $100/semester to go to umass).

There's no real equivalent to any of those in medicine -- if I have a problem and don't have employer-provided insurance, I'm bankrupt, period.

Add to that a government assisted monopoly on "medicine"

I just went through some of the posted reports. There is one that caught my eye. Someone developed a "bidding" portal to reduce cost. Quite intriguing:

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-930984

At least it seems that getting a handle on the prices is the way to go.

I'm glad someone is investigating this. Hospitals get away with charging whatever they want, and somehow evade criticism despite it all. We need to reform healthcare in the US and hospital price gouging needs to be included in the discussion.

The whole system is messed up. This is due to a lot of factors - great information asymmetry, shady at times process of drug approval - with lots of missing and massaged data (Ben Goldcare - "Bad Pharma"), the urgency when you need help, the fact that politicians refuse to admit that healthcare is not a moral play and free and efficient market, the weak regulators, the lobbying, the revolving door between regulators, corporations and politics, the huge and complicated laws that you must comply with ... I don't think there are many entities that cannot be held responsible for a part of that mess.

This is the third time this story has made to page one in two days. It shows how important this topic is, especially for the hacker community.

If you have a job with health benefits you'll think hard before leaving it to start something of your own. But unless people take those chances our economy is doomed.

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