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- Hacker News
- So why do American hospitals fly the flag if they dont actually want to help their fellow Americans ?
- Thanks for shining a light on the scam!by bgolson
- List prices are entirely fictional. Nobody pays them. Their sole purpose is price anchoring for negotiations with insurers. Hospitals know they have to give 80-90% discounts to certain payers so they set them high.
There is zero value in showing them. All they do is demonstrate a dumb pricing game that could easily be ended if the GOP didn’t conflate “single-payer” with “single-provider” and scream socialism.
Moreover 80%+ of hospitals no longer charge on a fee-for-service basis but through DRG (diagnosis related groups) as part of a value based care model. So these itemized list prices are doubly moot.
- Very cool. I don't know what your plans are and whether you're trying to monetize this but I think a very simple extra feature would just be to allow a natural language search for those particular rows since people may not know what the procedures are called but an LLM would: e.g.
"broken arm at red cross hospital" or something
by sightspinner - This feels both very depressing and very helpful. I wonder if it would be possible to use things like this to call out the most egregious examples and get them adjusted through public pressure? Maybe be able to call out specific institutions in a region as being significantly worse than their competitors?
Calling hospitals in an area "competitors" almost made me vomit in my mouth... so maybe the problem is bigger than this.
by blobdole