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Actually, dental care is like that in the US - your dentist can tell you the price, and you can price shop it. If you happen to have dental insurance, they may not know how much of that bill will be covered, but you can absolutely get costs from them.

Other healthcare on the other hand is often a mess, although it is getting better. I've found recently (an MRI in this instance) that I was able to get costs beforehand, and even compare prices. I think the prevalence of HDHP (high deductible health plans) has steered people towards expecting to pay out-of-pocket for care, which has led to a positive change in this area.

Got it. I only used dental as an example in Canada because majority of everything else is already covered by universal health care, so I don't have experience dealing with pricing for other things in Canada.

Vets are like this too. Vets and Dental are very simple.

My root canal is $325? Cool. I can shop it around or go with it. Same with a pet procedure.

Medical is the crazy town.

Is this because dentists can tell patients who forgot their wallets to take a hike, hospitals can't, and for the most part hospitals don't do emergency dentistry? [0] That is, if dentists were more "ethical", we might see the same problems with cost and payment in dentistry that we see in health care in general?

[0] Sure, there are extreme exceptions, since most hospitals have a dentist they can call when an emergency patient is admitted because an abscessed tooth has destroyed their entire body... It takes commitment and/or great misfortune to get to that point.

To be fair to doctors offices, this is in part because some insurance plans (Medicare's the biggest offender, but then again Medicare's the biggest everything) pay doctors below cost for certain procedures. Doctors cope with this by systematically overcharging other patients' insurance companies when they're reasonably sure the patient has already hit their copay for the procedure.

Essentially, health insurance for the poor isn't formally subsidized well enough to make it actually workable, but doctors have professional ethics that disincentivize them from refusing care. So the system has evolved a clumsy, ad-hoc mechanism for wealthy patients to cross-subsidize poorer ones.

American health insurance sucks.

Below what cost?

Below the marginal costs of care.

In other words, if a practice can purchase a vaccine or supplies for a lab test at $100/unit wholesale, Medicare pays the doctor (in the aggregate) $93 for it. That doesn't take into account any overhead or costs of running a practice, of course, such as wages for nurses and administrative staff.

Providers typically make a loss on Medicare patients and then make up the difference by charging private insurers (who are, by law, required to pay more than Medicare does).

Medicare's rates are so notoriously low that for doctors who can't do this - doctors who treat a disproportionate number of Medicare patients - they actually have a separate stipend program to pay them enough to stay in business.

Does anyone know how to look up what Medicare/Medicaid pays for particular procedures, and how to look up codes in the first place?

Somehow I came across that G8709 was for prescribing antibiotics. I figure I should be able to plug that into something like:

https://www.cms.gov/apps/physician-fee-schedule/search/searc...

...but I apparently don't know the proper incantation to get that to work. It would also be interesting is someone had concrete side-by-side examples of what Medicare/Medicaid pay vs. what everyone else pays for several different "common" items.

> It would also be interesting is someone had concrete side-by-side examples of what Medicare/Medicaid pay vs. what everyone else pays for several different "common" items

No payer (including Medicare) pays a single price across the board - even Medicare pays different amounts to different providers in different regions, etc. So there is no one single price for each payer that we could compare, and it'd be hard to find true apples-to-apples comparisons between them, short of polling individual practices and asking them what they received last month (which is hardly rigorous).

Remember that these are often treated as closely guarded secrets - if they were truly public, the AMA couldn't charge for access to CPT codes, and it would be harder for Medicare and private payers to negotiate the minimum rate for each provider. It's the same reason you'd be hard-pressed to ask most companies to make all of their individual salary data public.

The reason we know that Medicare pays so little, though, is that (a) it's no secret - even Medicare doesn't really try to hide it, (b) Medicare has to publish aggregate data, and we know from the aggregate data that they reimburse 7% less than COGS on average, and (c) it's statutorily mandated.

Are you saying that Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates aren't public information?

> Are you saying that Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates aren't public information?

Private insurer rates are definitely not public information, for any definition of "public".

Medicare reimbursement rates are sort of public, but not at the level of granularity you want. And a portion of that is because the question is not easily defined. For a given CPT code, Medicare might pay one of many different rates, depending on factors such as the geographic region, whether the provider operates in a CAH, whether the provider qualifies as a DSH, etc. That level of granularity is not easily accessible, and without it, there's no way to give meaningful example individual comparisons without running the risk of cherry-picking non-representative examples simply due to availability bias.

(Also, Medicare and Medicaid can't be lumped together. Medicare is a single, federal program that is administrated in four parts. Medicaid is a set of 50 different programs run at the state level, each of which can be administrated in more ways than I can count. The one thing that they all have in common here is that, like Medicare, they pay abysmal rates to providers, but the relationships that they have are even more complex - even in a single state, like New York, there are literally hundreds of different ways that Medicaid services can be provided, depending on the type of plan chosen.

Source: founded a company that had to abstract all of this complexity for patients, who were disproportionately on Medicare or Medicaid)

Yes, I'm willing to give up on the comparison to private insurance/transactions. So now I'm just wondering how to get a hold of Medicare reimbursement rates. We know that they vary by location, and other factors. But it must boil down somewhere, to a lookup table or a formula or the guy processing the forms who rolls a dice and multiplies by the last 3 digits of the medical code to come up with the reimbursement, etc.. Or is it all based on trust, and Medicare just pays 70% of any invoice that gets submitted to them? (And they send auditors out every once in a while in order to keep up appearances)

By contrast, you can see the entire GOÄ (Gebuhrenordnung für Ärzte) for Germany online: http://www.e-bis.de/goae/defaultFrame.htm

The first column are the number of points a given service is assessed for, the second is what the publicly-mandated insurances that most Germans are covered by will pay, and the third is the private rate: private insurance or straight-up cash. Doctors and other providers can choose to charge higher than the usual 2.3 multiplier for private patients, and they can choose to only accept private patients, but most accept the public insurances, too.

I can confirm that these are the current prices - I'm privately insured with the highest legal annual deductible (1200 EUR) and pay those bills out of pocket.

Result: Visits to my Hausärztin (primary care doctor) are somewhere in the 30-70 EUR range, full price. Just about everything in healthcare is startlingly cheap in Germany compared to the US (dentistry is only somewhat less expensive than in the US). About 10 years ago, I paid less for the same procedure without participation from my insurer than a friend did in the US after her insurance paid its portion - and I had a night in the hospital, while she was an outpatient!

A small correction: The second column is not what public insurance pays (usually it's more). They use an entirely different table, the EBM.

> Does anyone know how to look up what Medicare/Medicaid pays for particular procedures

Medicaid is separate state-run programs with different reimbursement policies in each state, and othe common federal rules governing the state programs include provider-specific (both cost and charges to the general public) limits, so, there is no simple “what rate Medicaid pays” for any service.

(And that's even before considering that in some states, a substantial portion of Medicaid is provided by private insurers who are paid capitated rates, not fee-for-sercice, by the states.)

I am familiar with NY medicaid. They do publish a way to calculate the Medicaid default rate. Insurers do not have to pay exactly this but it provides a decent base line. Here is a basic description of how inpatient pricing works.

Each year the state publishes the set of hospital rates and intensity weights for each DRG (Diagnosis-Related Group) and severity combo (currently using weights developed in 2014). So a DRG of 460 (Renal Failure) with a severity 2 has a weight of 0.7393. Now the actual cost will depend on which hospital you go to since each hospital has a different base rate. For example each Mount Sinai hospital has a base rate of $8,743.45 while Niagara Falls memorial hospital has a base rate of $5,558.99. Each hospital also has a per discharge rate. To calculate the default rate take the hospital base rate x DRG intensity weight + per discharge rate.

https://www.health.ny.gov/facilities/hospital/reimbursement/...

Forgive me, but I'm deeply skeptical of unsourced claims about any government program on forums where there are a lot of IT folks. Do you have references or suggestions for specific things to search for to support these statements?

Below operating costs. Rent plus utilities plus relevant salaries plus amortized cost of equipment.

This is confounded a bit because a lot of medicine involves lots of expensive equipment and staff with huge student loans to pay down but low day-to-day operating costs, but for a lot of specialties there exists no set of insurance-independent prices that allow a normal clinic following industry standard practices to operate without losing money.

> Below operating costs. Rent plus utilities plus relevant salaries plus amortized cost of equipment.

It's worse than that - it's below COGS (direct materials). So even before you account for rent/utilities/salaries/amortized costs, they're still making a loss, unless they operate in a CAH.

That's actually a response to the insurance company performing a type of information arbitrage with multiple other parties.

You could have health insurance with transparency, but there is too much profit potential in forcing information asymmetry between all of the parties involved in the system.

Every time that you think...doctors...hospitals...nurses...are up to something, most of the time it can be tracked back to insurance companies and the sway that they hold over congress with their money. I'm not saying that there aren't doctors, nurses, hospitals trying to gouge people. I'm just saying that insurance companies are worse. (With some very rare and egregious exceptions.)

Even with that I still don't give doctors an excuse. There are a bunch messed up incentives there too. Such as doctors recommending more expensive drugs, or giving me coupons to buy said drug. I'm assuming there's money exchanging hands there too. Not sure if it's with doctors directly.

But the end result is that I simply cannot 100% trust any advice I'm given.

These days there's not going to be money - but there might be steak dinners. But there are lots and lots of doctors who's ethics say that steak dinners with drug reps are off limits.

But no steak dinners still doesn't mean you won't get this happening, because some docs look at your insurance and figure that for you, your out of pocket will be lower with a coupon than with a generic. Sure the insurance company might pay an arm and a leg - but by and large docs don't care about insurance company profits, and do care about the person in front of them. And thus waste.

Other docs think all generics all the time -- even if the cost to the patient is massively higher. On the opposite side sometimes the expensive drugs just are better (even if just marginally) and most docs don't think about costs at all - as it's very very complex and their lives are busy enough.

It's messed up for a thousand reasons, not for one reason.

>But there are lots and lots of doctors who's ethics say that steak dinners with drug reps are off limits.

There are a lot more that think it's not their job to care about those things. They think they are only responsible for curing the sick regardless of time or money constraints or conflicts of interest.

They say they don't do this, especially in regards to money, but talk to all sorts of docs about how much of their patients' time they waste every day and they get real defensive. They think they are owed anything and everything and fuck running an efficient practice, fuck your time because they're a doctor and they are over in a different room performing miracles.

The egos in medicine do WAY more harm than good.

I personally know a bunch of doctors and you are right, they are pretty arrogant. Each one of them is also brilliant. I'm actually pretty close to some of them so in one or two cases I'm biased.

They actually have a hard time being "efficient" in the sense that you use the word, because if they don't run every possible test when they miss something and get sued they will have to answer for it.

Why are there so many lawsuits? Because the first thing that insurance companies do is lawyer up.

I'm not saying that doctors aren't also bastards sometimes, but Americans also think that doctors should deliver healthcare like a retail service and that's just stupid.

Your whole "in a different room performing miracles" might actually be running late because they are double booked and behind schedule due to trying to be thorough with an old woman who has compounded issues related to multiple diseases. That woman is also a person, just like you and the doctor might be trying to spend some time trying to help them even though insurance and the shitty clinic they work in only want them to spend 10 minutes with any one patient. That may sound efficient until you need to spend 20 minutes to do something right. Then the schedule is effed the rest of the day and people will act like you are trying to do something to them by being late.

Its hard for me to say this, because generally I hate people, but not everything is intended as a slight against you.

Its not with doctors directly in almost all situations. Not saying that they aren't also cocks sometimes but there's a lot of the iceberg that you can't see. I'm telling you, the more you look the more you will see its middle men like insurance companies that are screwing every party in a multiparty transaction.

Never trust anyone 100%. This is America.

The bill shows they asked for $X, but the doctor already has a negotiated agreement with the insurance company that says they will accept $Y for the service.

Additionally, if you inform the office you are paying the bill yourself (without insurance) they usually give you a discounted price somewhere between $X and $Y.

In other words, almost nobody is paying the list price of $X. It's not really a meaningful number.

(And, as others have pointed out, the weak US dental insurance market means that actually dentists are pretty up-front about pricing in my experience.)

And in a number of situations, they'll give you a price significantly below $Y.

Dental insurance in the US is a bad example, because they generally pay for (in a year) 2 routine cleanings, silver fillings, and a percent of anything else, up to some ridiculously small maximum of $2k or something. You very much can get price quotes for dentistry.

And really, they should NOT be paying for 2 routine cleanings, because those costs are both modest and predictable and that's not the point of insurance.

The reason they do pay for the cleanings is that it's probably cheaper than paying for the increased fillings and root canals that they would incur if people skipped the routine cleanings. So they want to incentivize that, even though it's not really the sort of unexpected ruinous expense risk that insurance is really meant to assume.

They could achieve the same goal by providing a discounted premium with proof of routine cleanings, but that's probably more complicated for both them and their customers.

> The reason they do pay for the cleanings is that it's probably cheaper than paying for the increased fillings and root canals that they would incur if people skipped the routine cleanings.

Actually, no, they reason they do is because they're usually subsidized by employers providing the plans. In other words, it'd be equivalent to the employer reimbursing a portion of your regular dental care that you pay for out-of-pocket. The expected reduction in cost for the insurer due to routine cleanings is negligible from their perspective.

If you purchase dental insurance individually, these treatments are very rarely covered, or if they are, the price under insurance is usually about the same as the price without insurance. Which makes sense from a risk model - when there is literally no risk at hand, the price under insurance should actually be higher than the uninsured price, by a tiny amount.

This is a great example of why most "health insurance" (or dental or vision "insurance") isn't really insurance.

It's a bundled prepayment model, similar to selling gift certificates/cards or the like. Basically making money on breakage / float.

Real casualty insurance wants to reduce the number/magnitude of casualty losses. So the theft insurer wants you to get good locks and an alarm, the fire insurer wants you to get sprinklers, and they all want nice orderly public services with good response times and suitable building codes. Win-win-win.

Nobody would ever be unhappy if they paid their whole life for fire insurance and their house never burned down.

But health "insurance" can't really reduce the amount they pay out (the "medical losses") because the customer is expecting to consume healthcare. It's also more complicated because one of the best ways to reduce medium term healthcare costs is to spend more on short term healthcare costs.

Can you imagine if the best way to prevent a house fire was to have a little house fire every year? (Well, that's not so crazy in terms of wildfires, perhaps.)

Then, there's the fact that in the very long term, everyone will die and many will get really sick just before that. And the private health "insurance" companies do their damnedest to avoid that group entirely, having effectively shunted them all off onto the commonwealth (Medicare).

Health insurance is not like other insurance and we need a new word for what it really is.

It's a bundled prepayment model, similar to selling gift certificates/cards or the like. Basically making money on breakage / float.

It's not just prepayment, but also a negotiated price that's lower than the average person can negotiate themselves.