a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2578 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Human Mealworm says people should choose between "iphones" and healthcare

The Week had an editorial last week about a woman salty that nobody would let her have an elective c-section. I told my wife and she said "what, nobody wants to give her $80k in free surgery? shocker."

The c-section rate in the United States is about 1 in 3. If you take a normal hospital delivery ($20-22k) and average two of them with a c-section, the average cost for a birth in the United States is $40k.

Primera Blue Cross will pay us $3200. Why? We're not a hospital, we don't do c-sections, and we don't have ninetynine skidillion ICD10 codes to bill. But then, we also don't have the overhead of a hospital. Shit, take away the malpractice and we don't have the overhead of a dentist's office.

Down in LA insurance wasn't required to pay my wife at all. She was a cash-pay business. So people would pay her $4500 and she'd say "you should at least get a high-deductible policy in case we need to go to the hospital" because statistically speaking, there was a 1 in 5 chance they would. At least a couple times people with no insurance ended up $120k out of pocket.

It's fucked up from all sides. (and by the way, here's a working link Having seen it from the patient side, having seen it from the provider side, and having seen it from the insurance side, the reason the system is so disfunctional is it's a zero sum game. If you want your nation to be healthy, you need to pay for them to be healthy. That's what everybody else does. But then, nobody else has dismantled a $200b industry before.