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> Hospital billed $100K, insurance negotiated to about $20K But those numbers have no relation to reality. The amount you would pay as a private individual wou

> Hospital billed $100K, insurance negotiated to about $20K But those numbers have no relation to reality. The amount you would pay as a private individual would be something else again. > The actual doctor only got $2-3K Could the doctor do the procedure on the street with their bare hands? That $2k also gets taxed and pays for education (it isn't disposable). I think you are hinting that you think the worker should get much more of the profit - but I'm unsure what economic theory that is called.

lolinder 3y ago
> But those numbers have no relation to reality. The amount you would pay as a private individual would be something else again. Exactly. The worst horror stories I've heard aren't of uninsured billing—self-pay individuals typically get a steep discount from what I've seen—it's the out-of-network hospital bills (especially pre-No Surprises Act) that consistently screw people over. In those cases the hospital would bill the insane number they officially ask for from insurance companies, the insurance company says "nope" and pays the portion they consider fair, and then the patient is (or at any rate used to be) on the hook for the remainder. If they were billing as uninsured the hospital wouldn't have come up with the insane number they started with, but now that's on record and that's the number they want.
- robocat 3y ago
  Gotta love me some cooked numbers & incentives for perverting. An obvious incentive is that the insurance company wants a big number so they can sell the patient on just how amazing their insurance is!
  - deathanatos 3y ago
    Yeah. For example, from Google… > The average salary for a Therapist is $31.40 per hour in United States And yet my insurance is billed at $1,000/hr. They knock this down (thankfully!) to $20/h, and merrily claim to have saved me 98% of the bill! Wow! And yet … I'm paying 64% of the therapist's salary. If I were uninsured, Google says that I would most assuredly pay nowhere near $1k/hr. I.e., the "98% saved" bit is hot, steaming bull.

lolinder 3y ago

> But those numbers have no relation to reality. The amount you would pay as a private individual would be something else again. Exactly. The worst horror stories I've heard aren't of uninsured billing—self-pay individuals typically get a steep discount from what I've seen—it's the out-of-network hospital bills (especially pre-No Surprises Act) that consistently screw people over. In those cases the hospital would bill the insane number they officially ask for from insurance companies, the insurance company says "nope" and pays the portion they consider fair, and then the patient is (or at any rate used to be) on the hook for the remainder. If they were billing as uninsured the hospital wouldn't have come up with the insane number they started with, but now that's on record and that's the number they want.

robocat 3y ago
Gotta love me some cooked numbers & incentives for perverting. An obvious incentive is that the insurance company wants a big number so they can sell the patient on just how amazing their insurance is!
- deathanatos 3y ago
  Yeah. For example, from Google… > The average salary for a Therapist is $31.40 per hour in United States And yet my insurance is billed at $1,000/hr. They knock this down (thankfully!) to $20/h, and merrily claim to have saved me 98% of the bill! Wow! And yet … I'm paying 64% of the therapist's salary. If I were uninsured, Google says that I would most assuredly pay nowhere near $1k/hr. I.e., the "98% saved" bit is hot, steaming bull.