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A comment on The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new report from Johns Hopkins. Parent comment

Re:The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new rep... by rscho on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @06:15AM (#18854761)
Indeed, I think so too. Ironically, people essentially tend to ask for freedom of choice above all in the US healthcare system (I want complete price info, yada yada...) when the US system is evidently already the one offering the highest level of patient autonomy, probably worldwide (regarding the ethics principles of beneficence, nonmaleficience, Justice and autonomy). But guess what? That has a price, who would have thought?!

Another point is that IMO, you can't go extreme on one principle without impacting the others. Nonmaleficience is clearly a problem in the US.

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Re:The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new rep... by DennisP on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @07:57AM (#18855200)
People want complete price information because we don't have price controls, like they have in Germany, France, and Japan. Having a "free market" in healthcare without showing prices in advance of providing services is sort of obviously the worst way to get a reasonably priced healthcare system.

That's somewhat mitigated by negotiations between insurers and providers, but not entirely given out-of-network charges.

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Re:The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new rep... by rscho on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @08:38AM (#18855395)
Agreed, however there is a solid base of evidence (as solid as medical evidence can be, which is not saying much) that health can't humanely be handled as a commodity.

Plus, providing complete price info itself is not free. Talk about administrative inflation!

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Re:The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new rep... by DennisP on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @11:06AM (#18856529)
So then, go with price controls. We have multiple examples of that working just fine. The answer cannot be that we make people responsible for payment before telling them what the price will be, and it's unsurprising that by doing that, we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world.
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Re:The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new rep... by arethuza on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @06:30AM (#18854824)
Indeed, its why I dislike ideological based arguments - once people commit to an ideology they will stick with it way past the point where it is clearly not effective (and this goes for right wing and left wing ideologies).
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