alt Hacker NewsChallenge is the whole system is just a mess. Medicare probably lays too little. Commercial insurers have formed a mountain of red tape and bureaucracy and arguably pay too much, although individual bills (EOBs) are rarely logically defensible against any scrutiny.
Healthcare providers try and combat all this by literally just making up pricing and trying to negotiate something while also having bloated administrative structures that raise costs for all.
Nothing about the current state of the healthcare system makes much sense to anyone that tries to peel back the onion.
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> Medicare probably lays too little.
What's wild, is that at least in the slice of healthcare I'm in, Medicare is one of our best most reliable payors. In fact, in some cases, our contracts with private insurers have them promise to pay at least 80-85% of what Medicare would reimburse us.
The other benefit with Medicare is that they just give us a lump sum of money and let us do what we want with it as long as we get good outcomes. Which means we don't have to fight for every visit we make to the patient. And they base it off of a public formula that we have access to (unlike with the private insurers).
>Nothing about the current state of the healthcare system makes much sense to anyone that tries to peel back the onion.
I'd offer a slight tweak. None makes sense in a vacuum or solely considering efficiency. It all makes sense seeing the evolution over time and the misaligned incentives.