Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

Re:Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills by throwaway201103 on Monday December 21, 2020 @02:00PM (#25498150)

There is a lot of overhead in a hospital ER. You need medical equipment to handle all types of injury/trauma. You need advanced and very expensive diagnostic equipment (e.g. MRI, CT scanners). You need treatment/operating rooms and all the supplies. You need physicians and nurses and supporting staff. You need lab services. All of your patients arrive more more or less at random, unscheduled, so you can't really optimize any of it. It's probably the most expensive way to deliver medical care that you could think of. Even if it's only a minority of the care delivered, it's very expensive to deliver it.

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Re:Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills by cogman10 on Monday December 21, 2020 @03:54PM (#25499431)

I agree, yet other countries have and operate ERs at a fraction of the cost of the US simply by virtue of having single payer healthcare.

> You need medical equipment to handle all types of injury/trauma.

This is equipment that most hospitals already have for other reasons. It's not like they have ER MRIs that sit idle and then an MRI for everyone else.

Further, a lot of that diagnostic equipment simply isn't needed in most cases. For ER related problems, xray machines are commonly all that's actually needed. Those are fairly cheap in the grand scheme of things.

> You need physicians and nurses and supporting staff.

A lot of the need for that gets cut dramatically by having a single payer system. The reason we have big ERs is because they are required to treat before seeking payment. As a result, many uninsured and underinsured people are using the ER as a primary healthcare system. Give everyone 0 or low deductible healthcare and you'll see the number of ER visits drop dramatically.

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