nradov

8 ms·

151.
by nradov 2mo ago
I'm not necessarily opposed to making all health plans non-profit, but that's kind of a red herring. Many of the largest insurers, like most Blue Cross Blue Shield Association members and EmblemHealth, are already non-profit. They
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by nradov 2mo ago
Right, and as I already pointed out below, cash pay patients have the right to demand a Good Faith Estimate (GFE) from providers under federal price transparency rules.
153.
by nradov 2mo ago
Are you perhaps unfamiliar with existing price transparency rules? Patients paying cash already have the right to demand a Good Faith Estimate in advance. Those using a commercial health plan can see the negotiated rates for every participa
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by nradov 2mo ago
Nationalized healthcare might help with certain things but it can't create capacity out of thin air. Just because the government theoretically covers everyone doesn't mean that services are actually available when needed. In gener
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by nradov 2mo ago
That's a pretty broad question. If you could be more specific in terms of the test results, recommended medical intervention, and patient profile (location, age, income, disability status) then I might be able to point you in the right
156.
by nradov 2mo ago
Feel free to blame doctors if that makes you feel better but the reality is that in most cases they literally have no way to accurately calculate a patient's out-of-pocket cost in advance. Like there's just no technical way to do
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by nradov 2mo ago
Nonsense. In every nationalized healthcare system there is care rationing performed by government bureaucrats. Regardless of a doctor's opinion on medical necessity, some treatments involve long waiting lists or third-party reviews or
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by nradov 2mo ago
The "just" is doing some heavy lifting there. Clinicians aren't required to participate in Medicare; in fact they have to go through a complex process in order to join. And there's no way that such a mandate could ever p
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by nradov 2mo ago
And then more and more providers would opt out of taking Medicare at all, so we would quickly end up back where we started.
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by nradov 2mo ago
I don't believe you. It wasn't the "same plan". I guarantee that the plan you had before the ACA had a lifetime benefit limit, perhaps as low as $1M. Read the fine print. A single complex episode of care could easily blo
161.
by nradov 2mo ago
Every country with nationalized healthcare systems has lower wages for clinicians. So the notion that this wouldn't lower salaries is just ludicrous. That might be an acceptable trade-off but let's not pretend it doesn't exis
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by nradov 2mo ago
Sure, it's possible in principle. But the US also has a much higher GDP per capita than the UK. The UK is a (relatively) poor country and is increasingly being left behind.
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by nradov 2mo ago
That's true, but obscuring the true costs through hidden cross-subsidies isn't helping anyone in the long run. We would probably be better off with state and local governments setting requirements for ER capacity in each region, a
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by nradov 2mo ago
Hospital billing practices are often terrible or even fraudulent, but stories about the $37 aspirin are generally misleading. Most hospital claims and bills are actually coded around day rates and DRGs, so even if the aspirin shows up as a
165.
by nradov 2mo ago
Pretty much everyone who lives long enough will end up with some sort of pre-existing condition.
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by nradov 2mo ago
I don't think anyone has good data on sports where events last >10 hours. The population of athletes is quite small which makes it difficult to study effectively. There is a bit more data on iron-distance triathlons, where the elite
167.
by nradov 2mo ago
Something like 20% of healthcare services are "low value care" which aren't justified by evidence-based medicine criteria and may even harm the patient. Regardless of the financing system we could free up a lot of capacity an
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by nradov 2mo ago
That's all true, but from a practical standpoint providers really have no way to accurately estimate a patient's out-of-pocket financial responsibility in advance. The current HIPAA adopted standard transactions don't allow f
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by nradov 2mo ago
Your blame is misplaced. Costs are increasing in spite of the ACA, not because of it. Pre-ACA your family insurance policy was likely worse in some key ways: it probably excluded coverage pre-existing conditions and had a lifetime maximum c
170.
by nradov 2mo ago
Without the ACA it would have been even worse. And by worse I mean that even if the premiums were lower, we would still have horrible limitations like maximum lifetime coverage amounts or exclusions for pre-existing conditions. There is a l
171.
by nradov 2mo ago
Correct. Related to that, accumulation of free hydrogen ions is associated with acute fatigue (although not necessarily related to chronic conditions like OTS). This is why some endurance athletes are now taking sodium bicarbonate supplemen
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by nradov 2mo ago
Oxidative stress could be a factor in some cases but connecting that to dopamine metabolism seems like a real stretch.
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by nradov 2mo ago
It's impossible to do really high intensity endurance training on a ketogenic diet. You won't have the energy to execute the fast interval workouts necessary to increase your race pace. So in that sense it will prevent OTS, but it
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by nradov 2mo ago
CT scans are non-invasive. In most US cities you can schedule one quickly. Screening tests are generally not time critical.
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by nradov 2mo ago
Olympic athletes typically live several years longer than regular people. https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/4/206
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by nradov 2mo ago
A DXA (DEXA) scan will quantify visceral fat for you. This is a non-invasive scan which uses a low-dose x-ray. Most cities have some sort of sports medicine facility where you can get one. It's typically not covered by health insurance
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by nradov 2mo ago
You don't even necessarily need insurance. Some of those tests you listed are pretty cheap so most people reading this can afford to pay out of pocket even if they're not covered by insurance.
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by nradov 2mo ago
There are lots of different types of heart disease. An ECG can be useful for diagnosing some of them but you're overstating the relative value. For many patients, a CT coronary calcium score or CT angiogram may be more valuable in term
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by nradov 2mo ago
Most professional software developers (probably including you) never do any work that could legitimately be described as engineering . And that's fine because most software isn't very important anyway. There's very little so
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by nradov 2mo ago
Of all the problems that governments should be working on, this is among the least important.

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