Hacker News Reader

Comment by d0mine | Hacker News Reader

Hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies. The customers are not doctors but shareholders. That is why a cure is seen as a threat.

View on HN

1) I was making an analogy.

2) I took at look at the most recent CMS data[0] I could find (from 2022,) and out of the top ten owners of hospitals in the United States, zero are payers. I only recognize about half of the parties in the 11-20 part of the list, but of the ones I do recognize, one is related to a payer. I can find no data to support your assertion that insurance companies are purchasing hospitals. They are purchasing physician practice groups, but that only reinforces the dynamic I described where hospitals have to court physicians to drive patients to their facilities.

0 - https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/582de65f2...

The biggest examples would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pittsburgh_Medic... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente.

I keep hoping my local university hospital system will offer such a thing.

I'm familiar with both organizations. 1) the OP asserted that insurance companies "increasingly" owned hospitals. UPMC and Kaiser have existed for decades. 2) together, they represent less than 2% of the hospitals in the United States.

Hospitals vs. physicians groups is a distinction without a difference in this context (people responsible for making you better). It is like on paper J&J is not responsible for cancer its baby powder causes (some bankrupt entity left holding the bag).

To make sure I'm not misremembering, I've asked deepseek in web search mode: "Is it true that hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies in US" It says: "In summary, the ownership of hospitals by insurance companies is a growing trend in the U.S. healthcare system, driven by the desire to control costs and integrate care delivery. While this model offers potential efficiencies, it also raises significant concerns about the quality of care and the balance of power in the healthcare industry." I've looked at several links it provided and they are consistent with the conclusion. Try it for yourself.

I don't see much point in continuing this conversation. I linked you to primary source data about who owns hospitals in the United States. You responded with some AI slop with absolutely no reliable citations.

I posted an analogy about the dynamic that exists between hospitals and doctors. You responded by saying that's a distinction without a difference, when the dynamic I described is a primary difference between the two groups: doctors can practice medicine without hospitals. Hospitals cannot provide patient care without doctors.

You seem like a human, so I give you the benefit of the doubt. Try to see the forest behind the trees instead of just repeating yourself ignoring what is said.

> Try to see the forest behind the trees instead of just repeating yourself ignoring what is said.

I'm not ignoring anything. I posted an analogy about how the US hospital business has some similar incentive structures as Google's search business, in that both are dependent on third-parties to deliver revenue. You, for reasons that are not clear to me, felt the need to post an unhelpful, off-topic, and incorrect rant about the insurance system in the US backed up, apparently, by nothing more than your favorite AI hallucination engine.

I don't think you've even tried to understand what I posted or why, nor do I think you are capable of understanding why your claim is completely irrelevant to what I wrote. Guess what? Even if insurance companies purchased every single hospital in the country, those hospitals would still be dependent on the doctors to operate.

That doesn’t make sense - a sick patient costs the shareholders money.

Setting aside the previous commenters "the cure is a threat" thing, there's some precedent for this in the US healthcare system in the form of HMOs (particularly Kaiser Permanente.) Part of that is supposed to be vertical efficiency. Part is the idea that it is possible to avoid extremely expensive acute care services with proactive low-cost primary care.

Only if you treat the patient. Cures cost money to administer. Better to just deny cover in the first place.

That's got nothing to do with cures. In that world administering a cure would be cheaper than treating a chronic illness, which is the opposite of what's being said.

One would think so. Unless there are programs that pay you for sick patients (risk adjustment) and you control how much you are willing to spent on a patient.

I've made a mistake of consuming healthcare related content due to the recent ceo assassination. Do not recommend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com