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by kaitai
3906 days ago
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How long were you on hold while your kid was clutching his arm? On the one hand, on the other hand. Many people are not good at judging what is an emergency and what isn't when it comes to health care, especially since vast swathes of the public no longer have more than rudimentary home health-care skills. So breaking your arm -- emergency or not? Concussion -- emergency or not? Falling out of a tree or off a ladder and having lots of bleeding, but not sure what happened -- emergency or not? Chest pain -- emergency or not? And what if you're the one sick? Say you've got what you think is a gallstone and you're in a lot of pain. How do you shop around? How can you evaluate for yourself how long it is ok to wait, and how do you deal with it when you go to see the cheaper internist for an evaluation but want the surgery done at the cheaper surgery but the internist looks at you and says, "Holy )(&! you're going in now" and they take you to the expensive surgery? And then how do you make sure some specialist doesn't visit you while you are unconscious and then charge for that "consultation"? A fun read with respect to the last question is on pregnancy in the US [1]. I agree with you in many ways -- it would be reasonable to give estimates, the ACA is insurance "reform" rather than health care reform, insurance is not health care. One big problem is that if your car doesn't work you can put off repairing it for a bit until you find a decent mechanic, but when you get acutely ill you can't put off care. (Well, you can try, but it just costs more later unless you die quickly.) [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/health/american-way-of-bir... |
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None at all. Possibly less time than I would have spent with a 911 operator asking me my address and whatnot.
> Many people are not good at judging what is an emergency
Perhaps, but I think in the main emergency care is an outlier in relative terms. I have no citation for you, but I just can't imagine that emergency care (i.e., you don't have time to make decisions about who to see, etc) is a very large proportion of healthcare dollars spent (and is also where insurance can actually make sense).
I think the goal should be to optimize the system for non-emergency care by making it a consumer-oriented market. As long as third parties are spending most of the money it can't be that, and until we have price transparency, the control of expenditures can never be with the patient.