...which is a messed up, Byzantine system. I'd love a single payer system just to crush this inefficiency out of the system and make patient's lives easier. I would have thought healthcare is all about saving lives but in the U.S. it seems like a dirty busy.
We need to do things like tort reform, the current system presumes that a doctor making a mistake is an extremely rare thing - its not, doctors are human like any other mechanic. Instead doctors over diagnose, and over treat out of fear of liability (which in most states is unlimited). we could limit liability to 2x the actuarial predicted lifetime earnings potential, and limit damages for pain and suffering to 1x that.
We need to allow insurers to pool together to purchase drugs to force the price down - medicare should also be unshackled and be allowed to negotiate pricing on drugs as well.
We should require cost transparency in healthcare - try asking how much a procedure is the next time you go to the doctor, you'll get a bunch of blank stares. People cant make reasonable choices if they cant perform a cost benefit analysis.
Those changes alone - while they may not reduce costs would stop the increases from occurring as quickly.
That's probably because the people you can ask who fully understand the procedure you need don't know what the prices for you are or everything you're going to need, and the people who know the prices aren't doctors and couldn't determine what exactly the procedure will entail. This is by design, of course, but it means that the people you might try to get a price from aren't able to tell you, even if they really want to.
Take your car to a mechanic, and ask how much a repair is before they look at your car. They can tell you typical costs, but can't tell you what your repair will cost yet. So you let them look the car over, then come back to you with an estimate. But that's still not the final cost, because once they start working something else might come up, and they'll have to stop to talk to you about the additional work. You don't know the final cost until all the work is done. That's the way it is with medical procedures too, except most of the time you can't stop midway through to discuss options and costs when something unexpected happens. The doctor just has to take care of it, and let you know about it afterwards.
If you're paying cash, you're going to get charged that over-inflated price. It's up to you to negotiate a reduced "allowed" price, like the insurance companies do, except you have no clout. You're also not allowed to know what those prices are; they're secret because if they weren't the whole scam would be a lot more obvious and would probably fall apart. (Eg: get challenged in court)
Its an eye opener.
I'm sure there could always be complications but there are supposed to be laws in place to stop hospitals from price gouging.
Those prices don't include a bunch of things you'll also need, which makes them a little misleading. Some of those things are predictable, and some, like your housing costs for the duration of your recovery, are not. In a typical hospital setting you're paying to stay in a hospital bed, and they can't tell you how much that'll cost ahead of time.
It's probably a lot easier to determine all of these costs on average rather than per-patient. Medical staff could be paid a salary, and hospitals/etc could set a budget based on average costs and workloads. Then a single-payer system could collect the money needed into one big pool and pay it out based on those budgets.
The companies in question own system you almost can't reform it without first literally lynching the fat cats that run it.
We MIGHT be able to render it obsolete with a single payer system that actually takes care of the citizens.
This is pretty much what we have now, except with an oligopoly instead of a monopoly. Not really seeing how going even more in the direction of a monopoly helps.
When people can make choices, thats when things change. People actually get sick, so paying for healthcare is more than just a cost, it can have a value as well.
At least with the current oligopoly system, there is a small amount of choice, and you can choose to purchase a drug on your own if what your insurer has on offer does not work or is more expensive. We should be going in the opposite direction - away from monopoly instead of towards it.
Instead of a single payer, we should have a single market.
No, Nearly every single payer system allows you to purchase extra health care, over and beyond what the single payer system provides.
In Canada, as just one example, this is sometimes called "supplementary health insurance". See https://on.bluecross.ca/health-insurance/health-insurance-10... for an example
> Government picks generic drug that works for most people and has no incentive to worry about the 5% - 10% of people it doesn't work for. Oh, well
Generally, this isn't true either. Government picks generic drugs, because it frees up the most amount of money for them to treat other people with.
But if the government covers medications and there's a real medical reason to need a name brand drug over a generic, they'll usually prescribe you the name brand one automatically. Here's a list of that happening in the UK, for example - http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Medicinesinfo/Pages/Brandnamesa...
And of course, as always, your still welcome to buy any name brand drug yourself, if you like.
Total utter FUD. It's legal and normal in each of the 3 countries I've lived&worked in with a single-payer system. You seem very misled.
I stopped after reading this.
> Then, in 2014, her pharmacist told her that her insurance plan would cover only the brand-name drug, which cost her family some $50 more a month than the generic. If she paid for the generic herself, it would not have counted toward her deductible. Ms. Freundlich complained to her insurer, UnitedHealthcare, but could not get a clear answer.
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They might offer coupons in addition to that (I don't know), but they primarily negotiate prices for a formulary. So those prices aren't going to be one time coupon type prices, they are going to be the price they have negotiated with the pharmacy in question (which may indeed change as they renegotiate).
1) We're not a pharmacy benefit manager; we just list prices and available discounts.
2) We're constantly looking for new prices and lower discounts. While prices don't generally change as much as mentioned above, they do sometimes change. I believe we're familiar with this case, and this was the removal of a price by one pharmacy benefit manager. We're sorry it went up, but it was only because this price has been adjusted by the pharmacy benefit manager, not because we're up to anything evil.
Even if your insurance company lets you use generics, it is a good idea to take a look at GoodRx, and take a look at Walmart.
I've had generics where through my insurance my out of pocket was a $20 copay, but when I checked GoodRx there was a $12 coupon. I've had other generics, again with a $20 copay if I got them through insurance, where they were $4 at Walmart with no insurance or coupons.