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Do you think when you're buying a hot dog at a stand, they're charging you the price of that particular hot dog, or the aggregated price within a particular time-window that the stand owner is operating in?
I think we need to go back to basics - it seems trivial to me that healthcare doesn't function as a market and doesn't work like other non-governmental activities. I provided a few examples of this in my replies.
If we can't get on the same page about that I'm not sure we'll be able to talk productively.
I'd really rather stay focused, because you made a very specific claim, and whether or not healthcare "functions as a market" is not even relevant to it. Literal socialized industries (including healthcare in other countries) are able to give you the price of a particular product / service, so even if American healthcare is somehow not a market, it still should be able to the patients information about the prices of it's services.
My claim was that the price, charge, and cost are all highly different from each other, often have minimal relationship to each other, have little value to the patient, and are highly misleading and hard to understand.
You noted "but I don't see how this is any different from any other industry that faces uncertainty (which is all of them)."
Well yes healthcare is different. That's important. It's inherently obvious in many ways. One of those is that "price, charge, and cost are all highly different..." the other is the problem with the supply and demand curves, the level of governmental intervention...... I provided several examples.
Furthermore -
Two posters in this thread neatly outlined the problem with what you are talking about.
If you charge people for what they use and only what they use and try and give them an answer in advance they get pissed when their hot dog costs 1 million dollars instead of 5.
If you add up the total costs of the ED and do some math to throw out the people who won't or can't pay and then charge people something that more resembles the true cost of the service on a per capita basis they then come on the motte and complain that they sat in a busy ED for 6 hours and got an ultrasound and it costs them how many thousands of dollars? (Sorry dev, but it's a good example).
Ugh we are back to healthcare doesn't function like anything else.
Few if any other lines of business are required by law to provide services to someone who walks in and says they will refuse to pay. Add on the fact that sometimes but not always you can get it covered by the government and the accounting is ferociously hard.
Obviously you can generate numbers like total revenue but turning that into useful information at the patient level is an ethical and political problem long before it becomes a practical one.
The claim I was originally responding to:
The part I was questioning was about how hard it is to give the numbers, how hard it is to make them accurate, and how costly it would be. None of it was about how little value they have for the patient, or how difficult to understand they might be for them.
It's yet to be demonstrated in ways relevant to the question of the difficulty of providing patient with the price information.
You can argue that this is not what the average American wants, but you haven't shown that it's impossible to show them those numbers. I already told you that, and you never addressed it.
A simple ED visit can cost <5k, 50 thousand dollars, 1 million dollars, or 5 million dollars.
An estimate for your kitchen getting redone is not like this.
The error bars around those are secondary to the fact that when people want an estimate in their mind that estimate is a commitment and being told a range from 500 dollars to 5 million is worthless information.
Yes plenty of healthcare interactions are simpler than that but if you are going to demand estimates for everything you have to capture this problem, if you are going to demand estimates when feasible we already do that.
If you actually think that the error bars are secondary, than not only is getting your kitchen done exactly like that, every good and service is as well.
Providers have to decide if they want to give a unified price to all their customers, or if they can predict which type of customer is associated with which kind of cost, and offer different prices based on that. If there's anything that would set healthcare apart from other industries, it is the error bars, but since you're saying it's not them (and I agree, that only impacts the price level, not the possibility of giving a price) this is absolutely nothing new for any entrepreneur or manager.
You might be right that the customers won't want to get profiled based on their diet or whatever - that is a completely irrelevant argument to what we're discussing, and can be addressed by regulators if it bothers people too much.
No?
Nobody is really calling for this and if given a list of priorities (like overall expensive, waiting room times) people will put price transparency at the bottom.
Additionally health system do not decide how much patients pay. Insurance companies do. If you would like more price transparency in how much people pay ask the people in charge of how much patients pay.
Yes? I don't know about you, but I never had to pay more for coffee because the espresso machine broke down earlier that week, or because the waiter they hiree recently is slower than average and can't cover as many tables as fast.
Is there a reason why you keep moving to arguments that aren't relevant to the conversation?
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