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A comment on Some young people are buying houses with friends. Parent comment

Re:Some young people are buying houses with friends by mcv on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @11:51AM (#19320345)
Hospitals don't want you to visit more often. At least not in any healthy society. Hospitals that do prefer ill people over healthy people are indeed predatory and dangerous for a society to have, because it operates on very harmful incentives.

I guess this is the clearest case ever of why regulation is important. Good regulation provides businesses with incentives that help rather than harm society.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Some young people are buying houses with friends by coldtea on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @12:32PM (#19320764)
>Hospitals don't want you to visit more often. At least not in any healthy society

"Healthy" society is a weasel word here though: a qualifier that turns this into a "no true scotsman".

In this one, and most real societies, hospitals do want people to visit more often. Their incentives are geared towards that.

And not just "visit more often" -- hospitals (well, hospital execs, doctors, etc) want (and do) all kinds of things detrimental to society:

- to charge more for healthcare

- to add hidden charges

- to perform unneeded operations and treatments to make profit (even if the patient not only doesn't need them, but can be in danger from them)

- to prescribe drugs that the drug companies wine and dine them to promote, whether they're needed or not

And whole more besides.

E.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unnecessary-tests...

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/18/unneces...

http://discovermagazine.com/2018/apr/doctors-wined-and-dined

https://theconversation.com/whos-paying-for-lunch-heres-exac...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Some young people are buying houses with friends by licebmi__at__ on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @01:15PM (#19321134)
>"Healthy" society is a weasel word here though: a qualifier that turns this into a "no true scotsman". >In this one, and most real societies, hospitals do want people to visit more often. Their incentives are geared towards that.

This might be true, but I would expect citations. I might be biased, is only anecdote, but my experience around the world would single out USA as a place where this is predominant.

Besides, not all the hospital visits are equal, a clear example of how we can align the incentives are vaccination campaigns.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Some young people are buying houses with friends by coldtea on Thursday March 07, 2019 @02:59AM (#19326330)
>This might be true, but I would expect citations. I might be biased, is only anecdote, but my experience around the world would single out USA as a place where this is predominant.

Sure, but most of the discussion on HN focuses on a USA context.

In my country for example, such incentives might not be predominant re: public healthcare (since the staff gets paid whether they have more patients or not), but they are with private practices.

[ Parent | on HN ]