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Comment by shostack | Hacker News Reader

My dentist dropped my insurer (Delta Dental) because they claim they did not cover things as reliably as they should. When I saw a comparison bill of what it would be in and out of network for a recent service it looked like the 60% increase in price was purely because my dentist billed more, which they then claimed is due to the discount The insurer provides.

None of this makes sense to me. How can I leverage this new data access to my advantage?

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People keep complaining government is too complicated and too expensive and bafoonish, yet they don't see how corporations are no different except their priority is maximizing profit not providing cost-efficient quality.

The point (in theory) is that in efficient markets you can choose between different companies offering a product/service and that competition drives down prices / costs. The healthcare market in the US is very much not a competitive market (in part due to transparency issues which this is trying to address, in part because of the perverse incentives in the health insurance system).

It's not so easy to have a competitive marketplace for government services (though I would not be surprised if the US saw the emergence of private police forces now, for those parents who actually want police officers that have a duty to protect their kids...)

But that doesn't happen in a free market because when money and power gets consolidated, monopolies and oligopolies can do whatever they want to dominate that market.

We have regulatory capture, legislation is written by think tanks like ALECS at the behest of corporations to benefit corporations thereby compounding the problem.

We need actual regulation or a reorganization of corporation ownership. Reorganizing corporations to be owned by the people who work for them rather than shareholders would shift incentives.

> When I saw a comparison bill of what it would be in and out of network for a recent service it looked like the 60% increase in price was purely because my dentist billed more, which they then claimed is due to the discount The insurer provides.

Well, rebates kinda DO end up working like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPa-RHVh97k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4_WNFPnmO8

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