Posted on 07/10/2019 7:10:27 PM PDT by Tired of Taxes
On June 24, President Trump signed an executive order, intended to return health care decision-making back to patients. It requires hospitals to publicly disclose how much patients will actually pay for services that they receive. It also gives patients the ability to use funds in tax preferred accounts such as HSAs (health savings accounts) to shop for health care. Both puts power in the hands of patients by providing information and opportunities previously unavailable to them.
Health care is the only industry where consumers have no idea how much they will pay for services until after they have received them. Powerful special interests, like insurance companies, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, prefer to keep things as complicated as possible, shielding patients from the true price for medical services.
At the executive order signing ceremony, a young woman shared the story about the stage 3 cancer that she successfully battled, but that caused her family tremendous financial hardship. Much of this problem was caused by the inability to shop for medical services. She had difficulty understanding why two bone scans done three weeks apart at two different facilities in the same city should differ in price by 30 percent.
According to the CDC, approximately 30 million Americans lack health insurance, largely because individuals cannot afford the exorbitant health care premiums while having to pay more out of pocket for services in deductibles and copays. A typical American solution to this problem is called Direct Primary Care (DPC). For as little as $40 monthly, a patient can have a regular doctor who will see them as often as needed and provide all services that they have available to them in their office. Many of these doctors provide prescription medications at no additional cost.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
I was on an HSA insurance plan. They make sense (like communism makes sense on paper). in practice it’s a joke. You have to drive back and forth between doctors office and pharmacy playing middle man to try and get a prescription that works but doesn’t cost a fortune.
You have no idea how much tests cost until afterward...so the idea of shopping around for doctors is a joke.
Needed some editing...
My biggest beef if the 4 out-of-network doctors who pop their heads in, look at you for 2 minutes and bill you several thousand dollars, which the insurance won’t pay.
Trump gets it.
Competition is the only way to drive down prices.
And many people would shop if they could. But right now the prices are hidden until the buyer gets the bill.
The next step should be to stop the government from meddling in prices.
Milton Friedman said “if you want to subsidize a transaction, subsidize the buyer, not the seller. That sustains competition.” This quote was in the context of school vouchers, but the principle is universal.
The transparency of costs exists today. The problem is that they are listed in Medicare codes. Unless you know all of the code that are going to be used in your procedure, you will never be able to make a good estimate of the cost.
And the bigger problem is that every single case is different. I am different than you; and we are both different from everyone else.
So, the cost of regular birth without complications might be similar—but they are not going to be the same.
And when you start posting prices, you better meet those prices. No one wants to hear how their natural delivery that turned into a cesarean delivery was going to cost more than we were promised.
Finally, medical treatments can be pretty complicated—I doubt most people on FR would be able to figure them all out, let alone a scared 17 year old middle school dropout who cannot read. (Of course, the FR readers will be paying for her child’s delivery.) I know there are smart people here—I am trying to make a point.
I have a very good doctor. He saved my life (suspected my Cancer) and put me back together (Spinal Fusion/removal of the Cancer). He is quite honest and says he wants out of medicine.
I agree with everything you stated
My experience was not with HSA insurance, but with having no insurance at all (when I was younger).
Example: A pregnant woman with no insurance (maybe she’s between jobs). She doesn’t qualify for “free” coverage. So she calls multiple hospitals. But none will quote a price for labor and delivery. (”It’s based on what the insurance companies will pay,” they all told me.)
That’s too bad. The president keeps trying, but he’s fighting an uphill battle against Congress and the courts.
There are many stories of that happening. I don’t understand why, if you go to an in-network hospital, not every doctor connected with that hospital is in-network.
Amen. Curious to find what Friedman said about healthcare insurance, I just looked it up, and he said pretty much the same thing about healthcare. Source
I had a great team of doctors, too, who saved my life.
The hospital billing department was the problem. The billing department was sneaky with the bills.
Elective surgeries like breast augmentation and lasik eye surgery are two perfect examples of this idea in action. It is not uncommon to see prices for a boob job posted on a billboard.
With Hopsitals and Surgeons, it seems to me they just keep billing you until you tell them to go attempt a solo sexual congress.
Great find! Thanks.
Yep. Just remembering a Stossel report years ago, showing how elective surgeries/procedures (not covered by insurance) post their prices up front.
Because their patients can shop around, the prices are more competitive.
OTOH, when a patient needs necessary medical care, the costs are covered by a third-party payer, and the prices tend to be inflated.
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