Must-read on health care

[hudebnik]

If you care about the U.S. government's budget deficit...
If you care about the competitiveness of U.S. businesses...
If you care about economic fairness...
If you care about preventing individual bankruptcies...
If you care about health care for all...

you must read Steven Brill's detailed exploration of the costs of the U.S. health care system.

If you already know how incredibly inefficient and corrupt the system is, read the article anyway: it's even more inefficient and corrupt than you thought.

Comments

[siderea]

[continued]

Still, in a rational world, Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers, and the uninsured (assuming all of these still existed) would all pay roughly the same price for the same drug, test, or service -- certainly not orders of magnitude higher for the people least able to pay. And that price would be public knowledge, just like prices from Amazon or Home Depot or the corner grocery.

Yes, a thousand times yes.

Also, I have no trouble believing about the triple billing thing: that was a pernicious AntiPattern in utility companies that I learned about on my temp job with the Massachusetts regulatory body charged with overseeing them, the Comm of MA's Department of Public Utilities. Part of why they got a temp was they were stretched a little thin on staffing while putting together a conference for MA electrical companies (mandatory attendance) at which it was explained to electric companies that you may only charge for an electron once. Case example (real examples, details as best I remember from 1995): A condo complex is under development and the developer's lawyer handles the utility bills for it; units sell, somebody forgets to handle the change over in the electrical bills to the new owners, who think electric is included in their condo fee; after two years, the law firm, which handles a large number of accounts payable on a large number of properties, finally notices, "Hey, why are we paying this bill?" and contacts the electrical company; the utility replies, "How is it our problem you failed to terminate service when you no longer wanted to pay for it? We're not giving you your money back, and you have no legal grounds to ask for it back, but we're happy to terminate service going forward," and then turns around and presents the condo owners with two year back bills.

Back to health care, in related news: providers have no idea what they're getting paid, either, when there's an insurance company involved.

This resulted, which you may find interesting.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

I was at the dentist last week and asked how much I owed on the previous visit. The receptionist explained that, after six months, the insurance company hadn't reimbursed them yet, nor even told them how much it would be. But her mother happened to have the same insurer I do, so she had a bootleg copy of the reimbursement schedule, which she could use to guess what I owed.

Helluva way to run a railroad....

This FAIR thing sounds cool. But the first search I tried on the "consumer" section of the site produced a page of SQL error messages, and the next one (for the rare, obscure word "orthodontia") produced no results. Needs some work on the implementation side.

[siderea]

Oh dear. Try a different browser? It was working great for me.