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So you want to increase the shortages in healthcare by requiring every service to involve a 15-30 minute lecture in billing paradigms and want every physician to receive additional training in multiple other people's jobs so that they can talk about this in a maximally fluent fashion?
This is why healthcare is so expensive "great, tell me how much it costs or I get charged or whatever" starts off reasonable but turns into thousands of hours of unpaid administrative labor a year and hundreds of salaried employees who are required to manage what is ultimately unnecessary and adds minimal value while creating a tremendous amount of expense.
Nobody needs to be on a receiving end of a lecture that explains that their insurance is paying 110% of the number that medicare randomly decided is an appropriate amount to pay for their diagnosis and that that number has absolutely nothing to do with the actual amount of money that the hospital is paying to provide that service or is charging the insurance company for it or would ask the patient to pay if they were financially on the hook.
The solution to government regulation and insurance making healthcare expenditures stupidly complicated to understand is not to subject everyone to a lecture about it, and it's certainly not to increase the cost of healthcare by adding unnecessary complexity that adds zero value.
Since these numbers are all made up and mostly unrelated to each other and de-tethered from reality and changing on a frequent basis, would you just accept us creating a new category of pricing which is "whenever a patient asks how much we give this answer" and then we can just call it a million dollars and call it a day?
Let's say you passed a law that says "a patient is required to get a sheet of paper with the cost, price, insurance charge, and so on for the median procedure of that type, and if you don't provide this accurately you get fined." Do you have any idea how expensive that would be to do because of how frequently these things change? You'd have to hire an extra department which works 24/7 365 and has a multiple staff in the hospital at all times or hospitals would have to just eat the fine.
Good faith estimate. Details of what needs to go on the sheet of paper can be haggled over. I'm sure we can come to a compromise. I bet you can do that pretty easily. Sounds a lot more efficient than a lecture. Glad you're starting to come up with better ideas than having the head of billing personally show up and manually do every single estimate and talk to every single patient (but I do remember the prior catastrophization, which is why I'm feeling pretty good right now).
The funny thing is, if this sort of law actually got passed, I'm pretty confident you'd figure it out pretty quick. It's actually pretty simple compared to a lot of other things that happen in your industry and others. You'd stop swearing that it would take 24/7 365 bullshit (which is Obvious Nonsense) and just do the damn thing. Shit, I am intimately familiar with the scramble to implement EHRs. Sucked for a while, probably still some lingering unintended consequences. But you figured out a process and did it. Bottom line: I absolutely do not believe your catastrophization of what it would take. It's Obvious Nonsense.
EDIT: BTW, you don't actually have to convince me. You have to convince the people who are willing to shoot CEOs dead in the streets of New York City and those who are cheering for them.
Actually no. A rule very much like this was passed a few years ago. Guess what happened? The information was inaccurate in the places that attempted to follow it and many hospitals chose to just be out of compliance and ignore it.
Citation needed.
https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-price-transparency
https://oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/2024/not-all-selected-hospitals-complied-with-the-hospital-price-transparency-rule/
That's one of the rules I've already mentioned, and I've already discussed why it didn't really accomplish anything. Moreover, it didn't even attempt to do what you just proposed.
EDIT: Also, that report shows that 63% did comply entirely within that timeframe. At least from the standpoint of "can you do this", the answer seemed to be "yes" for the thing that rule wanted. They're reporting failure as failing in any component, so I'm sure that'll be cleaned up in a few more years.
The government said "publish price transparency" and a third of hospitals just said "no." The remaining 2/3s published random nonsense. And there were penalties for this!
Because the price doesn't matter.
It's pure cost disease. Zero value.
Everyone has one or more ideas like this that don't do anything useful at all and increase costs and complexity.
And then they get mad when shit is expensive or the doctor can't spend time with you and explain things but they have tons of nonsensical administrative work.
If you are going to make things more expensive do it in a way that provides some value, but better yet don't make things more expensive for no reason especially if you are going to complain about costs.
This is (and you are proposing additional) regulation that adds nothing of value and increases the administrative burden that is already a third of healthcare spending.
Nah, man. They didn't ask for anything like you suggested. And two thirds complied fully within a pretty short time frame, because what they asked for obviously could be done. I'm sure in a couple more years, that number will be higher.
Just do it. Just do what you know you can already do. What you already admitted that you can do; it was a lie before when you said you couldn't. You already admitted that you do do from time to time. We've been through every objection, in detail. I've responded, in detail. You're all out of excuses at this point and are just resting on speculative claims that it could possibly take a modicum of effort. Boo hoo. Grow up. They're literally shooting your people on the streets of New York City. Others are cheering. Stop lying to yourself and to others. Actually inform your patients and actually get informed consent. You probably will like the haphazard results that will follow if you don't clean up your act less.
No they are shooting people who work for insurance. The people who are the problem. Hospitals, patients, and physicians all get screwed by insurance.
Informed consent has nothing to do with price, because the price doesn't matter. We discuss the risks and benefits of a given medical treatment. The cost is between you and your insurance and/or the government. This is to some extent by law (for instance emergency care).
I also can't promise you a price or cost or charge before hand. That remains unchanged. I can get you rough estimates maybe, depending on the thing. That's not the same.
You have yet to explain how providing more detail on cost, price, or charges adds any value to the system.
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