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fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
21hr ago
Looking at my game files, I don't seem to have any(??). It doesn't even have a Steam workshop.
I can't remember why I bought the game, as you seem to be able to pirate the whole thing.
Maybe I wanted mods but never got around to it because I was enjoying vanilla.
Extended power plant range was on the list of mods I wanted though, kind of cheaty, but it gets tedious.
yofuckreddit
21hr ago
I'll mention that the people I know who raise chickens often complain about the challenges and costs. I wouldn't do it.
For decoration/wallpaper, one thing my parents did was cut out Calvin and Hobbes strips and use them as wallpaper. It was awesome. So: Be creative about what "wallpaper" means.
Building secret compartments in the house of a sort could be cool. Vaults in the drywall, for instance?
I love the concept of building forts etc. as well, huge part of my childhood.
Throwaway05
21hr ago
I would advise people to be extremely careful about this because the rules are frequently revised, confusing, or impenetrable to patients.
Yeah you do see issues with straight up fraudulent charges at times (usually you see this in Medicare when someone gets caught and obliterated by a federal prosecutor) but usually it's completely by the book or mild but justified up-coding. Hospitals have entire departments whose job it is to comb through notes and make sure they extract every dollar from insurance.
Does talking to the patient about their relationship count as brief therapy? What if the psychiatrist uses CBT language you aren't familiar with? Does an ear lavage count as a procedure? Does time based billing refer to purely face to face time or does coordination of care, medication ordering, and documentation count? Can you use MDM as part of your E/M instead of or in addition to time based billing? When was the last time the answers to any of these questions changed?
Doctors often go to workshops that teach them how to bill correctly, yes to up-code but also to make sure they don't accidentally commit fraud by putting something in wrong. It's hard.
If you complain you may get some stuff knocked off but it's very possible you are making an accidental fraudulent complaint and they just don't want to fight about it.
Especially if your insurance is paying, help the health system out dawg.
The doctor is unlikely to find out you did complain but if it's an iterated relationship and you keep doing this you will end up with worse service because they'll get told to clean up their documentation and be careful and it will knock them out of their flow state and likely result in petty inconveniences (ex: more likely to rely to mychart with 'schedule an appointment'").
For OP specifically - I'm obviously a homer for the medical care side of things but you should consider that insurance companies are famous for incorrectly denying things that were provided and even things were provided and billed correctly.
Ultimately the problem is that it's hard to give numbers in general, it's harder to make them accurate, nothing the hospital can do can guarantee the numbers are accurate, they are therefore not very useful in the vast majority of situations and also have a very real cost to deliver to a patient.
I might be a simpleton (it is very likely, in fact), but I don't see how this is any different from any other industry that faces uncertainty (which is all of them), where the prospect of telling the end customer "you don't need to know the price" is typically seen as absurd.
For your case to be persuasive, you'd need to do some comparative analysis, and show how the kinds of uncertainty faced by the medical field is much larger or fundamentally different from, say, car manufacturing or agriculture.
If making the numbers accurate being impossible / comes with costs, how can insurance companies function to begin with? Their existence hinges on having reasonably accurate numbers for these things. If they do have accurate numbers, I don't see how passing them to the customer would generate edtra costs - we have computers these days!
And if it's all really so arbitrary, is there any point to this system? Would anyone really notice if the whole healthcare system got nationalized, with Stalin's reanimated corpse in charge?
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
Well, it is claimed territory. In fact, much of it is also claimed by Argentina and Chile. And China and the US do not have any claims and are unlikely to just play along.
For all practical purposes, the British claim is as valuable as if North Korea claimed half of the Pacific as their territorial waters.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
21hr ago
Same, except the game came out when I was in college and your post made me feel old. But like you, I tried playing WoW classic and it just wasn't the same. The game was (mostly) the same of course, but my frame of reference was different and it had a much different feel as a result. I ultimately didn't stick with it, though I did have fun for a while (and my wife said I was "bellowing with joy" when I got my first green drop in Elwynn Forest, lol).
ControlsFreak
21hr ago
I read the article as criticizing both the provider and the insurance company, rightfully. They never once put the blame for "dropping the ball" solely on one party or the other. I don't either. Both parts of the industry need to get over the ridiculous idea that prices don't matter to patients and do better at informing them prior to decisions. It is mostly the gestalt sense that prices don't matter and that there's no point in informing patients that causes both of these players to fail so miserably.
It is unfortunate that the author didn't tell us much more about UHC's perspective on the matter. That might have given some choice quotes to make my point further that they're not getting it, either. But we did get choice quotes from MSK which very clearly and directly make my point.
Throwaway05
21hr ago
I mean I think the article is accidentally a great example - they didn't actually need to know and numbers, it got covered, no?
They did end up running around sweating because the insurance company decided to be an asshole, which is what they do. Physicians complain about prior auth abuse all the time, and United is one of the worst. Basically they just try and refuse enough and slow things down enough that at times patients and doctors will give up and go with sub optimal management.
Quality price transparency doesn't help in those sort of situations and will likely help insurance company's beat on health systems.
It's also extremely expensive, you'd have to hire a lot more staff, and since people always expect physicians to know these things you'd probably have to cut clinical supply.
You could certainly change the system via regulation but that has its own costs and there are easier targets to reduce patient angst like prior auth reform.
For a more paternalistic and therefore likely less popular take - the system is incredibly complicated and even people who are subject matter experts in it get shit wrong quite a bit. Injecting patients into the mix would just add to the confusion, expense, and angst.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
21hr ago
Does Rimworld have curated mod packs a la Wabbajack for Skyrim? My patience to manage mods has a strongly inverse correlation with my age lol
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
21hr ago
Definitely play vanilla first just so you get a sense of what the game is like, just enough that you can win fights against evenly matched up fleets up until mid-game so you don't suck and don't get overwhelmed
Then get into mods and it'll be less overwhelming
I hate vanilla purists though, I recommend getting QoL and UI mods immediately
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
The UK's claim to a slice of Antarctica is worth about as much as if they claimed a crater of the moon instead.
Nobody wants to live in Antarctica. I would rather raise kids on a container ship.
This means that the normal process of the rule-based international order, where local polities organize however they like and get recognized as states (which is already flimsy in the case of Greenland with its 0.028 persons per square kilometer) will not have a good solution to this.
The traditional solution to solve conflicting territorial claims is, of course, war. Happily, Antarctica, being south of the Tropic of Cancer, is far outside NATO territory. So if the Brits want to wage war against China or Argentina in some god-forsaken desert of ice and desolation, let them.
Alternatively, the nations of Earth might jointly decide to exploit the resources of Antarctica, but in that case I would expect a reshuffling of territories. China is not going to accept that it does not get a slice based on some claims frozen by a treaty 60 years ago. Nor is the US, certainly not under 47.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
21hr ago
Genuinely I have no idea
I'm willing to be the first to cooperate vs defect as I believe in the power of human win/win coordination
But I am a single human with 0 political power
Honestly I'm mildly a doomer about all of this, I just refuse to say "fuck it" and embrace the zero sum game
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
21hr ago
I have played Starsector, but only in the most technical sense. I booted it up once, did 5 minutes of the tutorial and then got sidetracked. Surprisingly, the reason I tried it was because I saw that mod you mentioned in an overview video, and wanted to learn the ropes before diving into the modded experience. I'll try and get back into it for good!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
21hr ago
I never seem to enjoy video games while high on weed. Drunk? Loads of fun. While my stimulants haven't worn off? Hell yeah, I'm absolutely going to out-camp that sniper.
I find a lot of Arma boring myself, and I do have ADHD. I enjoyed Zeus because there's always something to do. Are the players getting complacent? Arrange for an ambush. Put on mood music. Start setting up an objective while they're cleaning up the last one. Eavesdrop on conversations, which is great fun because that British unit had some funny MFs in it. In contrast, while I do like the PvP, I would definitely prefer less driving between objectives or long hikes.
By all means, you must give Rimworld a go. Play one game of vanilla, or maybe three, note all the major annoyances, and then go hunting for mods to fix it. I probably get more enjoyment out of "hey, that mod looks cool" than actually playing the game lol, especially with how things break once you have too many. Can't blame them, when I've had 500+ mods running at once.
ControlsFreak
21hr ago
I agree that there are plenty of situations where the patient doesn't really have much skin in the game or where price mostly doesn't matter for whatever reason. I wrote about an example of the former here.
The latter are probably quite routine, too. This is sort of unsurprising in economics. Demand curves slope downward, and everyone to the left of the equilibrium point gets consumer surplus. The further left you go, the more surplus they get. If I'm a customer who would buy an apple for $2, and prices usually vary a bit around $1, but maybe if there's a bad harvest, they're like $1.50, then yeah, for the most part, the price doesn't matter to me. That doesn't really imply that the price doesn't matter in general. So, riffing of what you say:
Price transparency is nice for society, but not crucial for patients.
Price transparency of apples is not crucial for a bunch of people whose willingness to pay isn't somewhat close to what the price actually is. But it's actually pretty important for society and for a bunch of people whose willingness to pay is much closer to the actual price.
Many people are discovering the headline-grabbing version of the problem, too. Imagine if apples usually cost about a dollar. It varied from day to day, but they didn't tell you up front. Some times, incomprehensibly to the individual, they suddenly cost $1k. But they also didn't tell you this until after you'd eaten it (after services were rendered). Everyone knows it's kind of sketch, but no one can bring themselves to just make the grocery stores give people a price up front. This is how a lot of people view the current lack of transparency. Memes abound about how you got a papercut, spun the roulette wheel of the American Medical Industry, and found out later whether it cost you $1 or $100k.
Secondly, the health insurer and the hospital already have a pre-existing agreement on a price list. What they are negotiating about is which medical procedures (and line items) are indicated.
Yup. This cuts out most of the arguments for why patients shouldn't get prices. At the very least, providers can provide an estimate of what procedures (and line items) they're planning to bill. They can look at the pre-existing, agreed upon price list, that they have, and give you the relevant information. Of course there will be cases where 'something happens', and it turns out to not be correct. The classic example is that you're going in for a relatively routine surgery, and there's like a 1% chance they're going to find something that 100x's the price. Well guess what? There's a good chance that the doctor already told the patient that there was something like a 1% chance of finding something that significantly changed the nature of the procedure. That's just good informed consent. That same informed consent should at least include some form of, "...and yeah, if that happens, it'll 100x the price." (Now, that may not meaningfully matter for some insurance cases, but just inform them, people!)
For the most part, providers and insurance know where the line items are that typically get argued over. Sometimes, a pre-auth is actually good to do. Providers can at least tell the patient what their plan is, but it would also be nice if they gave their perspective on whether the planned billing was likely to run into difficulties or not. As the linked article puts it:
Given that presurgery mental health is surely part of the institution’s concern, it could have sent out a note saying: “Hey, you’re about to get a scarygram. Don’t worry, we’ve got you. Here’s why.”
Just communicate. If there's likely to be some sort of issues with haggling over line items, inform your patient the best you can.
confidentcrescent
21hr ago
Based on the linked article I read, the couple was unsure about going forward with the surgery because it was unclear how much of the bill their insurance would cover. They got surprised with this last minute because their insurance dropped the ball.
None of the problems in this article are described as being caused by the healthcare provider and the author himself seems to think that these problems were at best only tangentially MSK's responsibility, including the following right after his criticism of them:
That said, MSK, like my wife and me, was downstream of UnitedHealthcare’s prior authorization system. The insurance company was the decider here, which puts the responsibility for quick and clear communication primarily on UnitedHealthcare.
Despite this, you spent most of your comment about prices in healthcare talking about doctors and providers. Why? How was this your takeaway from an article which almost entirely blames the insurance company?
Jiro
21hr ago
Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war
And exactly how are you going to do that?
Jiro
21hr ago
If people won't and can't use the prices, how exactly do we get the situation in the OP where the NYT writers specifically wanted and could have used price information?
Lazuli
21hr ago
I understand a few people on this site really abhorred RF Kuang's 2023 novel Yellowface.
The book is way more enjoyable if you ignore Kuang's seething and take the satire at -- pardon the pun -- face value.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
21hr ago
I guess Lucas should have listened to the suits instead of his nerd buddies and ditched his pulp space opera idea. Audiences won't connect with it. And even if it was produced they would only give him the toy rights.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
22hr ago
Kind of?
Until you're both way worse off at the end of it all. Although I guess you're both worse off together.
Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war and a commitment towards shared prosperity (as that's worked quite well for the last 10,000 years) but that brings us back to "the current crop of western political leaders are myopic morons"
They do if the government can't effectively recoup their investment via tax revenue-- which is what happens when money goes to tax-avoiding corporations.
Yes, that's the problem. Treasuries are essentially just an investment in the government's future ability to raise revenue, but that comes with the obvious moral hazard that when growth fails to cover the interest, "raise revenue" ends up becoming "raise taxes". I do agree with you on the "managed investments" bit-- and also the competent, professional team bit. With reference to...
You won't find me arguing in favor of the implementation. Trump is definitely not the president I trust to do this. But the fact of the matter is, the government helicopters loads of money into flavor-of-the-month causes literally all the time, regardless of party or president. So why not set the standard that the government will get equity in return? And with reference to price discovery-- the government committing money into a sector is a truthful signal that the government is interested in promoting it, and that the government will become self-interested in making favorable regulations toward it. Obviously there are moral hazards associated, but price discovery, of all things, is not going to suffer.
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