alt Hacker NewsNot sure I'm buying it tbh. I'm no fan of the American healthcare system, but we don't need to invent new accounting to make it look worse than it is.
Lots of businesses and industries have legal obligations to pay money for various things at various times, they don't treat that as pass through...it's revenue and expenses. Money is fungible.
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This is addressed in the first paragraph of the pdf, with comparisons drawn to other industries and financial instruments where such income is not considered revenue. One can of course disagree whether it should be accounted this way, but the concept is not outlandish.
“This measure, while a standard accounting metric, obscures the strong financial performance of financial intermediaries such as health insurance companies, whose revenues are mostly pass-through payments between insured individuals and their health service providers. […]”
It seems to me that this document is almost entirely an argument for changing the accounting rules because of this distortion.
I respectfully disagree. Should Stripe or VISA count all charges made with their network as revenue?