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The $23,000 bug bite

Why should docs be required to publish their prices on the internet?
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Why not? Every retail establishment in the country must mark items with prices, and honor those prices.
 
xjx388 said:
How so? I don't see that part of the legislation. . .
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It's related to the other sentences in that post. My employer is confident that the legislation will increase its financial security, and therefore decided it was able to give all the employees raises. Only small ones, but still, pretty sweet.
 
wollery said:
Well, you totally missed DL's point there.
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I could have sworn the point was: "There's a new reason to provide health care: so our fragile children -who can't see a breast in public or a penis anywhere- can be spared the horrific realities of a man turning black and covered with flies."

Children in UHC ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ see the same thing. Plenty of homeless junkies dying in the streets and parks of UHC countries.
 
xjx388 said:
Why should docs be required to publish their prices on the internet?
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So people copuld look them up for themselves without having to travel or listening to a sales pitch.

xjx388 said:
I see little benefit to such a law. If people would simply shop around for a doc or hospital like they do for anything else, they would find prices are not as hidden as widely believed.
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They can shop much more efficiently online, especially if they're immobile. Who wants to travel from hospital to hospital?

Health care costs are out of control, it couldn't hurt to introduce some market forces.
 
Well...that is what my post says. But most of the homeless I was referring to froze to death for lack of shelters. Frostbite, hypothermia and other medical problems were untreated unless they were life threatening. And by that time it was too late for them.

I have no idea how many were drug addicts.
 
WildCat said:
Why not?
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I'll explain in a moment.

There's no way that the US government is going to purchase every single hospital, clinic, pharmaceutical company, medical equipment manufacturer, etc etc under any UHC system we end up with.
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They don't need to. It helps if they have some control, but it's actually not needed.

Right, that's why it's next to impossible to bilk the government in military contracts. Unheard of! :boggled:
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The trouble is that you don't understand the way to do it.

Okay, so the how.

Medical issues are not really random. That is, if you have a population, while random to the individuals of that population, you can get a pretty good estimate of how many injuries, how many heart operations, how many hip surgeries, how many cancers, etc, a specific hospital or clinic will see each year based on their population base. In wealthier areas the rate will be a little lower, in poorer areas it will be higher, but the same game applies.

So, instead of the hospital billing the Government, the Government pre-buys the services of the hospital. For instance, say you know that a particular area has approximately 0.3% Heart disease a year and a population of 200,000 people, then you know that you should have about 600 people needing treatment in a year. It's not that hard to correlate the estimate to the data to make sure of that. Let's assume they do match (if they don't you investigate and redo the estimate on what you find until they do). You then go to the Hospitals in the area that cover heart operations, and you buy 625 operations from them. They now have funding to pay for doing 625 heart ops in that year, 25 more than you expected. At the end of the year they show how many they actually did. If the figure is within a certain percentage of the original estimate (600) all is good and you carry on. If it's low then they have to explain why, may have to pay money back, and it might effect furture funding. If they are over the number, again it gets investigated as to why, and if legite, the funding is increased to cover those operations, and future funding could be increased.

Guess what, you have now eliminated fraud by over billing because any claims of higher numbers of services required than the population of the area predicts will be investigated prior to funding being given.

Best of all, hospitals and clinics can get on with the job of treating people instead of chasing payment for their services, because they have already been paid to do the job. The only way they can commit fraud is to get paid and then treat no one, and they'd get caught very quickly doing that.
 
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I never did get an answer to my question, inquiring as to which exercise regimen is recommended to restore the hair cells in my cochlea :(
 
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