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Fuck American doctors, I trust my mechanic more
(hexbear.net)
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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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I'm convinced American doctors and nurse practitioners take a course in school designed to deflect questions about pricing. I have asked so many doctors what a procedure will cost and they all throw up their hands and get all "aw jeeze I'm just a doctor I don't know prices". And just about every time its not covered, its a ridiculous fee, and they DGAF.
so then you ask the front desk and theyre like "call your insurance company" and then the insurance company can't give a straight answer. even the dentist does quotes before fucking me in the ass.
“See?! It’s because dentists are private practice! They don’t have to deal with hospitals and insurance! So everything should be fee-for-service!”
~ Every AnCap at every Thanksgiving
While it’s true most doctors have no idea what anything costs, the truth as to why has more to do with hospitals and insurance companies collusion. They agree to pay doctors juuuust enough to divorce their understanding of class from that of their patients. That’s why, despite not knowing what anything costs, doctors loath treating Medicaid patients because “They should just get a job and get off Medicaid.”
If you think doctors don’t give a fuck about you, it’s because they’ve been trained to see you as a leech. If you’re a business owner, you better believe they’re going to go to bat for you against the big bad insurance companies. You want a good, empathic doctor? Find a underfunded public health clinic. You’ll find them there, and they are, by design, the ones who will know what things cost and be least likely to help you out.
American doctors are complicit in causing current state of affairs in medicine. AMA (American Medical Association) is chiefly responsible for limiting the number of doctors to half that of other developed nations, causing American doctors to be the highest paid in the world. They are enriching themselves at the expense of the public.
It's mostly the same trick as the Ticketmaster/artist false dichotomy. People can get a convenient scapegoat to blame (insurance companies, hospital administrators) while doctors can get rich without a public outcry against them.
They'd really need a course to understand the pricing. There's the basic visit charge which should reflect the level of treatment provided. They select one of the level options and do not see a price. Labs could go to a different facility for processing and priced by a system into which the doctor has no visibility. After these and other charges are combined, they could be fed into some sort of pricing machinery that's so complex that hospital systems just buy products that do that pricing instead of trying to figure it out in-house. All of that yields what they expect from insurance. What insurance says you have to pay is a function of your copay structure, coinsurance, deductible and how much they want you to hate your life. Afterwards, the hospitals' financial assistance policy may come into play.
There have been some attempts to make all of this somewhat more transparent in recent years -- you can search for "shoppable services" to learn more.