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from the there-should-be-an-app-for-that dept.
Fountain Valley resident Jennifer Moore makes a really good point.
"When you take your car to the mechanic, they give you a written estimate before they touch it," she told me.
"So why is it that when you go to the hospital, you have no idea how much something will cost until the bill arrives?"
Moreover, why are prices so completely different from one healthcare provider to another?
And why is it that when patients try to find out in advance how much something will cost, they're treated like unwelcome guests rather than equal partners in their own treatment?
[...] The near-total lack of transparency in healthcare pricing is a key reason we have the highest costs in the world — roughly twice what people in other developed countries pay.
Simply put, drugmakers, hospitals, labs and other medical providers face no accountability for their frequently obscene charges because it's often impossible for patients to know how badly they're being ripped off.
[...] Moore's insurer, Cigna, was charged $2,758 by the medical center for the two ultrasounds. However, Cigna gets a contractual discount of just over $1,000 because it's, well, Cigna. All insurers cut such sweetheart deals with medical providers.
That lowered the bill to $1,739. Cigna paid $500. That left a balance of $1,239, for which Mika was entirely responsible because she hadn't met her $1,250 deductible for the year.
Moore quickly ascertained online that the average cost for a pair of ultrasounds is about $500 — meaning the medical center's original $2,758 charge represented a more than 400% markup.
Cigna's lower contractual charge of $1,739 still meant the bill had been marked up more than 200%.
And the $1,239 Mika had to pay was more than twice the national average.
Wait, it gets even worse.
Moore said that after working her way through various levels of customer service in the medical center's billing department, she learned that the cash price for the two ultrasounds was $521.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-07-29/column-could-our-healthcare-system-be-any-dumber
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:07AM (10 children)
Insurance doesn't magically fix supply and demand problems. News at 11.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 03 2019, @03:00AM
>blockquote>Insurance doesn't magically fix supply and demand problems.
Is it insurance or an intermediary, though? Even more, an intermediary which, by its behaviour and existence (think "a big pool of money the insured never controls"), alters the supply/demand equation.
Sorta the compromise that compromises everything - neither public health (fully regulated), nor self-insurance (personal responsibility - i.e each setting aside money for the rainy days)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Saturday August 03 2019, @03:52AM (1 child)
You think medical care pricing has anything to do with the abstract idea of "supply and demand", rather than scummy executives calculating what price they can get away with when "Grandma's on the table" [commondreams.org]
For profit healthcare makes as much sense as for-profit policing or for-profit military.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 03 2019, @05:49PM
Or for-profit prisons, or fire control, or allowing the ex-tobacco industry to dominate the retail grocery supply chain.
Good business is where you find it, for as long as you can get away with it, and when it grows to the proportion of for-profit basic healthcare - you may as well be negotiating with the coast guard when they are pulling you off a sinking ship in stormy seas...
What if, in addition to taxes, businesses had to report their human impact: number of jobs provided, income paid to those employees, actual (leaving home until returning home) time worked by those employees, working conditions for those employees (life safety, health safety, stress), and their impact on their customers: how are they helping people in the world? And their suppliers, and their environmental impact. Collect that baseline data for 4 years, then spend the next 4 years hammering out tax incentives based on business impact.
Want to charge $3500 per dose for Epi-pens? Sure, you can do that, but your negative quality of life impact on your customers (the ones dying because they can't afford a product that's cheap to make) should result in an increased $2000 per dose tax - which can be provided to a competitor as an incentive to give generic Epi-pens away for free.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:13PM (6 children)
Quite the opposite. Third party insurers, whether they be government, or private, drive prices UP. That's the whole idea of having a middleman. The middleman makes connections for you, while charging you for the privilege. That much should be obvious to all of us, no matter our age, sophistication, intelligence, or whatever. Middlemen drive prices up.
To make things worse, the vendors are milking the system. Sometimes, they remain barely legal, sometimes, they just don't care about legality. They know how the system works, so they milk it as hard as they can. You, who only get wrapped into the system now and then, are always the victim.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @07:00PM (2 children)
What ticks me off is they do not get this.
Adding more middle man, AND gobs more money, and hid all the prices that drove up prices. They like to pretend economics does not exist for them at all.
Then they want to pretend my insurance rates have nearly 100x from the early 90s. If I was paying what I did now for insurance in the 90s I would have 0 co-pay and walk into any place i wanted and they would have covered it. Now I have huge deductibles and about 1/4th the choice I used to have. I know what the insurance rates for the early 90s were too as I worked as a clerk in an insurance firm that sold it. Many of the customers I typed in data for were at MOST 200 bucks a year. These were people in their 80s!
Hillarycare made us have to get a job to have the 'good insurance'. Obamacare put the top onto that and made it so I paid 10x. Now they stand in front of me saying they can fix this shit. They make it worse every time!
I can walk into a place and say 'i will pay cash, today, right now' and almost every single time the price drops from something ridiculous like 5000 dollars to 200 bucks. Even 200 bucks is 'too much' usually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @12:09AM (1 child)
Had Obamacare included a public option, we likely wouldn't be seeing the continued increase in premiums that we're seeing. Last time I checked, the rate increases had somewhat slowed, but not by enough.
The other issue though is the GOP's continued efforts to undermine the law at every opportunity. Between that and the lack of a public option, the only real choice here is to continue to push for single payer, medicare for all solutions to end the problem forever. I'm not surprised that the GOP is fighting this so hard, having guaranteed medical care available to everybody would greatly weaken the hold that employers have over employees. As well as demonstrating that the government does do somethings better than the private sector.
The worst thing though is that while most people in all parties support the idea, you can't even get most Democrats on board with the importance of real reform to the system. They keep talking about incremental change knowing full well that that means each change will be hard fought and most voters are more concerned with their access and how that will change. Medicare for all is an easy argument to make. Even my former roommate whose father suffered some malpractice in the UK still wouldn't give up the NIH system for what we have in the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 05 2019, @10:20PM
My sources say that ACA stopped being a problem to major insurers right at the time they got out of the marketplace plans because they weren't making enough money.
You know, when suddenly the priority became that the ACA had to go, and miraculously the individual mandate was repealed.
That the ACA is costing the mainline insurers money (money, not potential insureds getting it for cheaper) is a nice fat lie at this point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @01:26AM
And yet single-payer healthcare systems and other forms of universal healthcare systems are substantially cheaper and higher quality for the average person than our own for-profit private death panel system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @05:15AM
methinks in healthcare these days, the actual patient isn't the customer, but just another product. All the health monitoring, genetic analyses, the patient's medical records, all fodder. any outcomes, are just coincidental.
In many ways now the actual care givers are also just another product.
the amount of info now captured in medical IT and insurance systems is pretty staggering.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday August 04 2019, @06:03AM
The prices are controlled by the government, after negotiations with the Doctors, here in BC. An MMR costs X (probably a couple of hundred dollars), even for the uninsured. Makes the accounting so simple that the cost savings more then make up for the lower payments.
Things that aren't covered are advertised. I go into any Doctors office and there is a list of prices on the wall. Need a medical for driving license or such, it's a hundred bucks or so.
The flaw is overuse, people going to emergency for a snivel and such, which does raise the expenses and causes delays.
It's not perfect, but everyone I know who needed surgery or such now, got it within 24 hours and usually less if they avoided needing it on Sunday.
Elective stuff and non-life threatening stuff can be slow as well and every Province is a bit different, healthcare is a Provincial responsibility in Canada with the feds shuffling money around and demanding a certain minimum to get some of that money.