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Major hospital system hit with cyberattack, potentially largest in U.S. history

nbcnews.com

23 pointsElement_7 comments

I feel no empathy for healthcare insurance or providers in this country which have personally caused me nothing but grief and provided me little to no benefit. It's hard to picture a worse possible system than the current one.

It has many terrible flaws, but one of the saddest things about it is there are so many people who work with and within it every day who very much care about patients and providing good care, and it seems like the system is just too large, complex, and established to significantly change despite peoples' best intentions and efforts. I've heard people describe valiant efforts like OpenEMR as "terrible" and "a nightmare". It's depressing, and I wish there were some place to hear good news about ways in which things are changing for the better, because despite having worked within a large hospital system myself, I just don't see much positive news around modern EMR alternatives, simplification of medical billing, paperwork reduction, etc. It's like a bureaucracy gone unstoppably wild.

Aren’t hospital groups in the us privately owned? So isn’t there a profit incentive to cost reduction or increasing efficiency? If so how come capitalistic forces hasn’t driven the cost down?

Because very few people pay for their healthcare. Insurance coverage separates the consumer from the cost of the service making little incentives to market on price.

Additionally hospitals and insurance companies both benefit by overcharging. The insurance company gets to negotiate a discount on the bill, then advertise these discounts to employers and individuals when they sell coverage. Hospitals get to write down the difference between the inflated billed price, and the actual paid amount.

One sector of healthcare where market forces have reduced costs are procedures not covered by insurance. Eye surgery and cosmetic surgery.

If they don’t compete on price, do they compete on service? Or simply just distribution (which insurance firm they are in network with)

Where they are allowed to compete yes, they will compete on service. But in many places it is illegal for hospitals to compete at all due to Certificate of Need laws. In places with CON laws, if you can't prove that your hospital will not compete with existing providers, you cannot build it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need

Your post reminds me of the bureaucratic futility in the movie Brazil. They need a Robert DeNiro character to swoop in and cut through it all like a gordian knot.

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