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- Hacker News
- Paywalled.by MoonWalk
- Surprised a healthcare CEO hasn't tried to bribe the gov to just let them be the only game in town.
- Aren't they about the only game in town?by tocs3
- The problem is the artificial restrictions on doctors to drive up prices and the artificial restrictions on medical equipment (patents) to drive up prices.by silexia
- How much of that spending is continuously treating symptoms vs. finding and curing root causes? At what point do the pentagon and other agencies step in and treat this like an unsustainable existential threat to the country?by Bender
- Never going to happen. Look how people freaked when politely asked to wear a mask.by 2OEH8eoCRo0
- The plan to extract as much wealth as possible out of families with members near end of life is showing excellent results.by androiddrew
- America’s decision to make healthcare a for profit industry is the root of all of this.
The obvious points are medicines and equipment. To some degree, these are actually the most justifiable parts of the industry that should be for profit.
The parts that are far less justified: - The insurance industry surrounding healthcare. Obamacare brought in some regulation that drastically slowed the growth of healthcare costs. - The education industry surrounding healthcare. Becoming a doctor in the U.S. is incredibly expensive. You rack up massive loans, you’re racking up interest on those loans for years, well into your late 20s (including the loans you racked up for your undergrad), and then you’re spending the first decade of your career all the way to the late 30s, just paying those loans back. You’re one of the most sought after professional in the world and yet it takes you until your late 30s to basically break even. The upshot of that is you charge a ton not just to pay back your loans but to justify spending so much time and energy on a career that means you start being money positive for the first time in your late 30s. - Insurance. The American legal system that does not place any penalty on frivolous lawsuits essentially inserts a significant cost due to bad actors on everyone. Personally, I’m not clear on what this cost actually is and how significant it is, but if you talk to doctors and hospital administrators, they seem to believe it’s incredibly high. - Hospitals being for profit. I actually think for profit hospitals are more efficient than non profit ones, but the problem here is what they prioritize. A non profit hospital system may prioritize family care and regular checkups to keep people healthy and prevent them from falling sick in the first place. A for profit hospital probably prioritizes surgeries and elaborate procedures that make a lot of money. And that’s before we get to spending on customer acquisition, either due to fancy buildings etc or just straight up advertisement and marketing.
by adjejmxbdjdn - IMO, there's an interesting opportunity for AI to make healthcare deflationary.
For example, Medicare is launching a new program in July that pays a fixed rate for achieving defined outcomes, like lowering blood pressure or cholesterol. Medicare's explicit goal here is to create incentives to automate the repetitive parts of care delivery with software. (Much of preventive cardiology is surprisingly algorithmic and guideline-driven, so this is more plausible than it seems.)
This reverses the incentives of the current system, where CPT codes incentivize doing more "stuff" (but not necesarily delivering the most effective care efficiently).
If you're a software engineer who cares about health, and have been sitting on the sidelines till now, I think the next few years are a really interesting time to make a contribution.
by brandonb - "AI will solve this deeply rooted social problem" is, and forgive my bluntness, is one of the most idiotic AI opinions I've seen this week.
The only thing that will fix American healthcare is absolute abolishment of private insurance. That's it. No amount of gentle incentive tweaking or whizbang technology is going to solve the fundamental problem of human greed and immorality.
Allowing private health insurance to exist is inhumane and can only result in profit extraction and exploitation of the most vulnerable members of society whose only options are literally to pay up or die.
That's the break. We've allowed profit-seeking individuals to stand in between citizens and literal life saving medicine. And you think the solution to that is to add more middlemen and profiteering exploitative corporations. Utter insanity.
The solution is to make it illegal for anyone to say "no, you may not have this life saving medication or proceedure". The solution is to remove profit from medicine. To allow profiteering and gatekeeping of people's very lives is immoral in the extreme. Giving more private corporations more influence is insanity. The solution is less private influence of medicine, not more.
by vitally3643 - It depends on who’s using it, and I’d say the doctors can use it more intelligently than the patients.
- > If you're a software engineer who cares about health, and have been sitting on the sidelines till now, I think the next few years are a really interesting time to make a contribution.
do you have thoughts on what that looks like? what does the hiring landscape look like?
by skt5 - > IMO, there's an interesting opportunity for AI to make healthcare deflationary.
How many times have I heard this, about how many techs. But this time for real?
Health spending in the us is too tied up with the country’s economy for it to ever be reduced. Same goes for housing. The cost of both of these will continue to increase. As long as the investor class is satisfied, this is all that matters.
by ballsac - $16,500 per person is insane. Someone is charging way too much for goods and services, and someone is paying it with no questions asked.by tencentshill
- We could end the Triffin dilemma by no longer maintaining the dollar as the unit of international reserve. This would eliminate the biggest driver of the trade deficit and via a reversing of the Baumol effect, lower the price of health care and education.
The only problem? No one has the political will to do it.
> Someone is charging way too much for goods and services
It's more money chasing meager supply. They're charging market rates. However when the market is distorted through the described arrangement, it's clear what has to change - the structure of international finance.
by kelseyfrog - The Seven-Times Markup: The Johns Hopkins study analyzed the nation's top 100 hospitals by revenue and found that their "chargemaster" prices (the initial sticker price) averaged 700% of the actual cost of providing the service.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/top-100-us-hos...
- The US spent $2 Trillion dollars on Medicare and Medicaid in 2024 [1][2]. If the US spent this money as efficiently as Japan (or UK [3], ...) it could pay for Healthcare for every single resident with this $2 Trillion dollars.
[1] https://www.kff.org/medicaid/medicaid-financing-the-basics/#...
[2] https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-medicare-cost-the...
by bhelkey