jimrandomh comments on Rationality quotes: October 2010 - LessWrong

4 Post author: Morendil 05 October 2010 11:38AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 08 October 2010 07:45:28PM 1 point [-]

This idea seems to involve people negotiating their health care expenses with providers directly, which doesn't work. Or rather, it only works for the routine expenses, and not the unexpected ones. Some fraction of health care decisions are made under conditions that are literally "buy this or die", and a large fraction of the remainder are made by people who are in no condition to negotiate, so either some form of collective bargaining, or else direct regulation of prices, is required.

Comment author: James_K 09 October 2010 06:01:17AM 2 points [-]

Not at all. Emergency care is precisely the sort of thing that should be covered by insurance. Equally, there's no reason why the providers of health savings accounts couldn't negotiate rates for their members, if that's a valuable service (in fact many insurance companies offer HSAs at the moment. Though I wouldn't object to the US government forcing hospitals to be more transparent about their pricing.