Requiring hospitals to make these lists may help the situation improve.
> No one working in a hospital knows how much do we acquire things for, or how much we get paid for doing things in advance. And only like 8 people can tell you that information 3 months after the fact.
This is the problem. There has to be prolonged pressure put on multiple parts of the system until it will start to optimize in different directions.
A nontrivial part of why no one knows these things in the hospital is because nobody has to know these things, the entire system (not just the hospital but the surrounding insurance system, the billing systems, the vendors, etc) is used to not needing to care about these things.
So these lists, as imperfect as they are, increase that pressure a little bit. Ideally, seeing the price fluctuation and seeing the reactions of doctors to these lists will prompt more in-depth questioning[0] from regulators, judges, and consumers. The fact that the lists are a joke is why they're not a joke. People need to be publicly reminded, again and again, over and over, that the way health procedures in the US are priced are generally broken, often arbitrary, sometimes opportunistically exploited, and almost always unnecessarily complicated.
The more obvious that becomes, the more attention that other parts of the system will get.
> No one working in a hospital knows how much do we acquire things for, or how much we get paid for doing things in advance. And only like 8 people can tell you that information 3 months after the fact.
This is the problem. There has to be prolonged pressure put on multiple parts of the system until it will start to optimize in different directions.
A nontrivial part of why no one knows these things in the hospital is because nobody has to know these things, the entire system (not just the hospital but the surrounding insurance system, the billing systems, the vendors, etc) is used to not needing to care about these things.
So these lists, as imperfect as they are, increase that pressure a little bit. Ideally, seeing the price fluctuation and seeing the reactions of doctors to these lists will prompt more in-depth questioning[0] from regulators, judges, and consumers. The fact that the lists are a joke is why they're not a joke. People need to be publicly reminded, again and again, over and over, that the way health procedures in the US are priced are generally broken, often arbitrary, sometimes opportunistically exploited, and almost always unnecessarily complicated.
The more obvious that becomes, the more attention that other parts of the system will get.
[0]: https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/baffled-judges-price-tra...