I went to the ER with my partner over a bit of a scare with some intense abdominal pain late at at night a few months ago. We were mostly ignored for about two hours in an empty ER room, and she received a chest x-ray and blood work. She had to go to the bathroom and one point, and they let her take off the pulse monitor on her finger. She didn't put it back on later and it was left flatlining for the remainder of our time sitting there.
They couldn't diagnose anything, and they ended up sending a bill (after insurance) for 3k+ of "level 5" (apparently the highest) emergency room care.
I don't claim to know much about how medical billing/expenses work, but it's just really sad and frustrating.
Looking in from another country it appears three, maybe four, problems drive this:
1) cost of avoiding litigation of large proportions, or even the spectre of it when possibly unwarranted
2) excessive cost of even basic medical supplies, partly due to (1) above, and parly due to the clubiness of the whole affair
3) excessive cost of developing drugs and the practices that allow minor repackaging of delivery systems to extend patents on existing drugs (no one wants to be the guinea pig, but the balance between risk and reward seems a little skewed when overall benefits to society are accounted for and people are dying from certain diseases anyway)
4) Overpayment of some medical staff, and underpayment of others, you can probably guess who. I get it, you want the best doctors and they should be incentivised to choose medicine and do well, but a doctor saves/kills one patient a time, usually, see (3) above. It is just as difficult and time consuming to become, say, a specialist engineer making key decisions where a mistake might kill dozens or hundreds of people. In my country there is only one job in government where the professional society gets total control over pay outside of regular guidelines, you guessed it doctors, and the relative amounts involved are frankly obscene.
When I see that medical misadventure is the third highest cause of death in USA now, it starts to appear hard to see how anyone can hink that the high salaries for some and the large amounts of money spent to keep people "safe" is not working, so why not spend that money in other ways.
It seems Obama got it wrong, the issue wasn't with insurance, it was with costs and general approach by the medical care providers. Many of these providers I am sure would desperately like to provide optimum care, but are just part of the juggernaut that seems to have no circuit breaker.
I would happily accept any criticism or correction of my views, as I am only relaying distant perceptions, some or all of which may be incorrctly founded.
Something similar happened to my dad when he had a stroke. Someone showed up to clean the room 4 hours later because he had been coding for so long they figured he was either dead or transported.
In your girlfriend’s case, they’ll sell that record to a subrogation company as well. If she ever gets into a car accident or has a back injury, she will get weird calls to try to get her to say something happened that night that would be another insurer’s responsibility.
Well, I believe the meta-question here is: why aren't we experiencing Moore's Law rates of efficiency in all aspects of human life? Doubling in performance every two years or so. Even if pricing remains relatively constant. I think it's sort of the basis of "Progress Studies". Look to areas that have kept up with Moore's Law (such as GPUs) and try to work backwards. Competition, R&D spend, relentless focus on innovation in consumer products, global distribution and the willingness to foster talent required to achieve those relentless milestones. Seems to be lacking almost everywhere except computational architectures (and perhaps payloads to low earth orbit) ;)
Silicon is pretty unique. Take crops, for example. There is no basis on which we could have a Moore's Law-like increase in soil productivity. We had the Green Revolution, but it was a one-off. There may be a second one waiting in the wings in the form of GMOs, but it's 50 years after the first one.
Why are crops so different from silicon? Because silicon was just a matter of doing the same thing at smaller and smaller scales. You can't improve plant yields by that kind of process.
Good bikes. Apart from not being available atm solid ones start around 1000$ and have no upper bound. Something with full suspension or carbon is +1000$
Re-useable stuff: we have these silicon containers as a substitute for sandwich bags, they are ridiculously expensive. Cloth diapers vs disposable. Places where there is kind of an inversion, and the re-useable version, which at some point would have been used by those too poor to get something disposable (like diapers) is now a luxury item.
Depends on how far your willing to go and/or if you buy into the "Audiophile" scene. For me the price that I am willing to pay for a pair of Headphones comes down to quality of sound, build and ease of repairability. The Beyerdynamic DT770's meet all of those markers for me at £130. There are other who will spend thousands.
I went to the ER with my partner over a bit of a scare with some intense abdominal pain late at at night a few months ago. We were mostly ignored for about two hours in an empty ER room, and she received a chest x-ray and blood work. She had to go to the bathroom and one point, and they let her take off the pulse monitor on her finger. She didn't put it back on later and it was left flatlining for the remainder of our time sitting there.
They couldn't diagnose anything, and they ended up sending a bill (after insurance) for 3k+ of "level 5" (apparently the highest) emergency room care.
I don't claim to know much about how medical billing/expenses work, but it's just really sad and frustrating.