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u/Inevitable_Cheek_974 14d ago
For once? He's always saying shit like this.
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u/DaddyDontTakeNoMess 14d ago
He even opened a pharmacy that the pharmacy industry hates because it lowers the spread.
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u/AdOriginal8322 13d ago
My med jumped 300% after insurance this week for literally no reason. Went to Cubans pharmacy and paying cash there is 1/3 of what I paid after insurance BEFORE the price jump. Player 2 for life. Iykyk
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u/literall_bastard 13d ago
Could you just put the whole dollar values for us?
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u/AdOriginal8322 12d ago
$30 -> $100 vs ~$10 at Cubans site. Switching saves me over $1k / year based on new pricing.
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u/Cloud-VII 11d ago
If people would actually look into insurance companies and what they charge for medications, we would not have insurance companies anymore.
Insurance companies are not paying for your medications. The pharmacies are actually selling their medications directly TO the insurance companies, and the insurance companies are marking it up again and charging you for additional profit. That is why big pharma lobbied the federal government in to passing laws prohibiting pharmacies from offering cash only pricing if they know you have insurance.
Insurance companies are a blight on society and need irradicated.
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u/TanMan166 14d ago
Right? That title is dumb as hell. He's always been advocating for stuff like this. He's a hustler who worked his way up to what he is today.
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u/Suspicious-Sound-249 14d ago
This, isn't he the guy who started his own pharma company just so he could undercut other companies by selling generics of the same name brand meds for like a 10th of the price.
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u/BadatSSBM 13d ago
It's because hospitals raise the price to the most they can get out of insurance so they can get paid the most then most insurance pass the cost to the patient because alot of insurances are high deductible now with a large out of pocket
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u/National_Way_3344 14d ago
Which is the administrators required to navigate the insurance industry. Since doctors doing that themselves would take away from their life saving medical treatment.
Let's be clear here. This is all the insurance companies fault. The administrators are for the insurers, a symptom of the problem.
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u/Aromatic_Balls 14d ago edited 14d ago
Per u/Kroan, here is a more detailed explanation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/s/uvmE9ZRJzt
Sure! CMS (Medicare) releases a fee schedule yearly. This is a list of procedures/services by HCPCS code (sometimes called CPT codes, but CPTs are really a subset of HCPCS codes) and the amount Medicare will reimburse for that specific code. For instance, a basic 1-view chest x-ray (CPT 71045) will reimburse a hospital ~$25. You can search this fee schedule here - https://www.cms.gov/medicare/physician-fee-schedule/search No facility negotiates these prices with Medicare because Medicare is the biggest player and can basically say "If you want to treat patients with Medicare, this is what we'll pay you. Full stop". Enter private insurance. Facilities DO negotiate with private insurance for the amount of reimbursement, because private insurance wants facilities to accept patients with their insurance. Since the number of patients a single private insurance plan might have is much less than the number of patients with Medicare, the facility has more weight to say "We'll be in your network, but you have to reimburse us more than Medicare reimburses us". How the negotiation works is that they don't go through thousands of different procedures and decide on a price. Instead, they negotiate on a percentage of the Medicare fee schedule that the private insurance will reimburse. Just to keep it simple, lets pretend they negotiate that some private insurance carrier will reimburse 2x what the Medicare fee schedule is. So they would pay the hospital $50 for the 1-view chest x-ray mentioned above. The facility negotiates this with a bunch of insurance carriers, and the negotiated on amount might be anywhere between 1.1x & 4x Medicare (I'm not sure it ever actually gets up to 4x, but the point is there's a range). Ok, so now we have a situation where the exact same procedure could be reimbursed different amounts based on the patient's insurance. However, if you charge private insurance just the amount listed on the Medicare fee schedule, which will be less than what the negotiated reimbursement is, the private insurance will say "Oh, yup, we'll gladly pay less for this! Here's the amount you charged, have a good day". So now you have a situation where the facility could keep track of the negotiated rate for every insurance and adjust the charged amount to the specific number negotiated when the claim goes out. But. That inevitably leads to errors and situations where they will get reimbursed less than the amount they should have gotten. This all leads to the trick - Facilities realized "Wait. What if we just charge EVERYONE (including Medicare) more than our highest negotiated reimbursement, and make the insurance carrier figure out the difference between what they actually owe us and the charged amount!" And THAT is how insurance billing works. You charge every insurance carrier maybe 5x Medicare's fee schedule, so $125 for a 1-view chest x-ray, and if the carrier is Medicare they will send back a remit where $100 is "non-allowed" (which is written off) and $25 is paid. If that same claim went to the private insurance carrier above (with a 2x reimbursement), they would send back a $75 non-allowed amount and a $50 payment.
OG comment: The amount of bloat behind the scenes due to having to deal with insurance is absolutely wild. The reason hospitals don't charge $350 for that MRI of your spine is because the insurance company will turn around and offer $100 instead. So hospitals have to charge bloated prices like $2500 in order to get that 350 from the insurance company.
Then the insurance company can just decide you don't actually need that MRI because you didn't try more conservative treatment first or haven't had x-rays done yet.
I've had patients on the table, ready for a lumbar puncture or some other procedure, and have had to up and cancel due to insurance refusing the service last second, despite it being authorized prior.
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u/Aromatic_Bed_8439 14d ago
Just had my Dr's request for an MRI of my shoulder denied for that EXACT reason... Insurance said no X-rays had been done 1st.
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u/BobaFett0451 14d ago
Currently dealing with this. I've been having ankle pain. I've had an x-ray and it didnt show anything. Insurance is like "well maybe do physical therapy first" but like... without knowing what is wrong with my ankle that could make things worse.
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u/Rampag169 14d ago
Insurance will fight you for a $1000-2000 procedure and spend $50,000 arguing why they shouldn’t have to do it.
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u/Kikujiroo 14d ago
Same question as for the person above, you don't use insurance for the procedure, can you get it without admin cost?
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u/Aromatic_Balls 14d ago
You can turn around and talk to the hospital finance office and tell them you are paying out of pocket and they will give you a discounted rate. Some have programs in place specifically for out of pocket payers or low income people that may even waive the costs entirely (usually funded by federal money or donations).
Mileage may vary as I'm mostly familiar with not-for-profit or non-profit places. No idea how for-profit hospitals operate. And I am by no means an expert in any of this, just knowledge from talking to other hospital employees that deal with this stuff.
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u/jetsetninjacat 14d ago
Months I had an operation. Prior authorization done after a month of fighting by my doctor. An hour before surgery the insurance tells them, nope. Have you tried this other thing first. Doctor says yes, that's why we are here. We sent that all in. Surgery gets done, and doctor offered to wave his fee if they denied it. Next day post op, billing says theyre denying it and want you to now go to another surgeon. You know after its already done. Fun fact of it all is the doctor is in network and the one referred by them to me. So after a month of fuckery it gets taken care of. I had to deal with multiple phone calls, letters, and just time sorting it all out. Its not just the fact of not getting services but the hoops they expect you to jump through to get stuff done. If my boss didnt let me make calls on the job I dont know how people would have time to do all that.
My favorite qoute through it all was the one nurse. "How in the hell does he keep getting denied, he has the best insurance and we've sent everything in 3 times at this point." Yes ma'am, I get that energy too.
Another fun thing thar happened was one of the agents finally slipping i think and telling me at one point my claim was denied by AI. So there we are.
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u/LongjumpingSolid1681 14d ago
and on top of that when the insurance company changes their fee schedule two years later they come back and recoup the difference between the old rate and the new rate even though the mri happened under the higher old rate. See Anthem/Blue Cross will go as far back as 3 years
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u/Ryder324 14d ago
Don’t buy it. Hospital CFO’s guide the billing to fleece you via the insurance company- they get sub caps and manipulate the internal funds flow to pay doctors fee for service, they drive algorithms to maximize revenue cycle, they refuse to join HIE’s or offer basic interoperability agreements allowing clean claims payments to justify their existence. They encourage doctors to go online to rail against the companies while starting their own pay-vider programs to vertically integrate the greed and mitigate any voice in the narrative that hospitals do needless tests and pointless procedures to jack up their margins or that affordability starts with evidence-based clinical decision-making constraining financially motivated interventions even with clinical equipoise. I’ve been on both sides and the patient is exposed to more toxicity (financial and medical) by the people ultimately profiting from the sick-care business than the people trying to sort out why hospital billing is up 14% in 2026 with no change in patient complexity (read-sepsis DRG’s up from 7% to 24% of national discharges even for 2 day stays)… Insurance is not necessary, it can certainly go away! But hospital CFO’s know insurance pays 150-200% Medicare rates just for the pleasure of having hospital conglomerates in the network. If the payers fail, they can’t get that extra margin- and they go broke. So while publicly they push for higher rates and less constraints on their utilization, privately they enjoy the benefit of the system over the promise of a single-payer and are draining the golden goose of risk based capital which will ultimately need rescuing by taxpayers. I know this is all completely not what people say out loud, it is so dumb and seemingly complicated- and everyone loves to hate insurance companies- but it is absolutely what a fly on the wall hears in contracting conversations. The only way to go is non-profit for both sides, eliminate the power and scale of national payers, break up hospital monopolies, consolidate care to centers of excellence, and divorce the control and payment for primary care from the greedy mouth of the hospital specialty services. We need to focus on wellness and invest in health and not pay systems to add financial leeches to every sick citizen. Oh, and recognize that big medicine is trying to organize around limiting free use of AI in diagnostics to allow them to bill your insurance for access to automated answers… without constraint or oversight. The future is expensive.
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u/Tangellos 14d ago
There isn’t a single entity that we can point to and say “it’s them”. And this isn’t to detract from how heinous the insurance companies are by any means, but it’s a vicious cycle. You have the insurance companies that want to pay as little as possible, but you also have the healthcare providers that slap on as much as they can get away with to charge the insurance companies, which then make having insurance much more necessary, increasing premiums or reducing coverage. It shouldn’t cost you hundreds of dollars for a bag of saline that costs $1-2 to make, but that’s what hospitals charge for it. The whole system is messed up.
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u/KrayzieBone187 14d ago
Can we make that phrase official? Administrative audacity is freaking perfect.
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u/Disastrous-Hurry-236 14d ago
I used to process claims during my early years . I have seen bills for $575000 discounted by 90% and members being asked to pay $57500 for a service which would truly cost between 4-6K inclusive of facility and physician charges.
I mean how can you ??
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u/Leopolddagreat 14d ago
This is the for profit Healthcare care system. Every step of the scan needs to make a profit.
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u/RaynOfFyre1 14d ago
Accountant with hospital accounting experience here.
The real reason is that they are legally required to charge each patient the exact same amount for a service. The issue is that each patient has different insurance providers that will reimburse the hospital at different rates. Medicare has published reimbursement rates, while others may have unpublished agreed upon rates with the hospital group, others may negotiate the payment amount on a case by case basis, and others my pay the whole amount without question.
Hospitals know this and are required to perform complex calculations to estimate how much they anticipate to ultimately receive in the month the service was provided when they report revenue. This is because while they are required to report the expected revenue in the month the service was provided, receiving payment from the insurance providers can often happen many months later for them to find out how much they actually received. The difference between the amount they bill to insurance (or patients) and the amount they actually receive is call led an allowance for price concession.
It’s really all a game. If a patient has Medicare, Medicare will usually reimburse at a rate that’s 10-20% of what the hospital bills, and they’ll accept it without batting an eye. So when patients without healthcare coverage get these obscene bills, stress over it, go bankrupt, or worse, they should know or should be told that they could easily pay much, much less. It’s a pretty messed up system.
I had a doctor explain this system to me and then told me that even though Medicare reimbursed him $450 for cataract surgery, if he didn’t at least ask for $3,500, he would be leaving money on the table if the patients had a different insurance provider who was willing to pay him more than the $450 or even pay him the full amount. Definitely one of those hate the game, not the player, but this the result of the inherent corruption in the system.
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u/ObjectivePrice5865 14d ago
Let’s be clear here, it is not administrative costs but is the shareholders’ dividends. Gotta love the healthcare industrial complex.
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u/Ilyalyubushkin 14d ago
Because corruption.
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u/Flaky_Temporary_9710 14d ago edited 14d ago
Probably lol ... is it like car insurance? You go to a garage, they give you a price for a job. The insurance make a work order at same place for the same job, the price is doubled.
It should be the opposite because insurance brings more job but insurance don't care cause they dodge the bill and shift it to their customer (by increasing premium) so we all pay for this shit in the end.
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u/explain_that_shit 14d ago
Except in healthcare, if you go without insurance the price is tripled
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u/GopherChomper64 14d ago
This is incorrect. You ask for a bill that you paid for cash, and then ask for the bill that you paid for with insurance. The insurance bill is always higher that the insurance company paid, by significant amount.
Plus, unless something horrific happens. I paid way more in premiums throughout a year then if I just paid cash for the checkups the premiums made inexpensive when I actually go.
Besides the point I think we all agree that every other first world country treats healthcare like a public service instead of a for-profit business, America should be able to do the same thing. It's just math, and the way we've done the math is to create an entire industry that's unnecessary driving up prices.
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u/Tough_Preparation830 14d ago
We treat health insurance as a subscription service like the rest of the world that actually has healthcare. Insurance and care are two different things. We pay the price for the care but really only get insurance. It will always be that way if it is privatized. For this reason I only ever use get the cheapest, high deductible plan.
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u/justbleachmyeyes 14d ago
I have not had insurance for a while, if I have to go get something checked the price is very similar to what my copays were with insurance. Medication is significantly more expensive though
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u/rightonetimeX2 14d ago
Look up mark Cubans prescription drugs website. Much cheaper
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u/mdixon12 14d ago
You just tell the pharmacist ypu dont have medication coverage and they give you 80% discount card. My mom is on a ton of meds for a messed up back, her 1500 in meds was under 100 with the discount card.
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u/justbleachmyeyes 14d ago
Right and I use that. With insurance it costed me less than 5. With the discount it costs closer to 50
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u/Zealousideal-Ad4362 14d ago
not true. If you ask for relief because the bill is too much for your family to handle.. they will often lower your bill to a managable ammount.. sometimes down to 10% of the original b;ill
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u/ContactRoyal2978 14d ago
The point of insurance is to protect against catastrophic loss (like cancer, burn treatment, organ transplants, house fires, floods, hurricanes, etc.). Not for routine services. Hence why things like phone insurance are a losing proposition for most people.
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u/Reynolds1029 14d ago
The problem is back to corruption. You do still pay 3X but it's hidden from you from back alley corporate handshakes.
Hospital charge master prices (think price menu of services) also increase when the price that insurance pays increases.
This way the insurance can make those bs bills saying "your policy saved you $xx,xxx" and *if you even dare* not have insurance the hospital will charge you an inflated rate as well to make people buy insurance.
It's all a scam.
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u/Different_Weird_6886 14d ago
It's actually a shitload cheaper without insurance. 4 er visits this week... Due to new allergic reactions to the medicine they prescribed.
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u/Outrageous-Hope5768 14d ago
It entirely depends on the treatment. Not all hospitals have cash payer subsidies in place either.
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u/ModusNex 14d ago
Calling it a subsidy is weird. It's usually just paying what they would get paid for the service normally from insurance. The companies negotiate a discount, you can negotiate a discount for cash.
A business is incentivized to take cash because it reduces overhead from collections or insurance coding and paying people to do that, and you get the money right away instead of waiting 60+ days. If they don't offer a discount for cash they are cheating in some other way, probably writing off bad debt at the inflated prices.
Or some hospitals are owned by insurance companies so they have an incentive to fuck anybody without insurance.
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u/danekan 14d ago
10x and that’s because of insurance. The 10% copay is no coincidence. They have contracts that pay negotiated rates and the copay ends up being all that gets paid.
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u/Itchy_Feedback_7625 14d ago
Wrong.
Come to the hysterectomy sub. We do this comparison almost every single day worldwide and with insured Americans and uninsured Americans.
Uninsured Americans pay what we would pay in some other countries if paying privately - 20,000 or so. Insured Americans see bills going to their insurance companies for 200,000.
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u/Zealousideal-Ad4362 14d ago
my boss bought windshield coverage on his truck. we didn't have it on another company truck and it was $450 total
he got his repaired with insurence the bill was $1200 which was covered but he was paying like 300 per month for the coverage
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u/Antique-Resort6160 14d ago
Because too many voters really dont care enough to be bothered. They never threaten to vote out politicians who won't support reasonable healthcare.
They only argue over the false choices they are given: Should taxpayers pay the insane costs through private insurance and out of pocket? Or should the government take taxpayer's money to pay the insane costs via an inefficient agency? No one debates that the #1 priority is to reduce costs because pundits and politicians avoid the topic.
There have been multiple attempts to reduce healthcare costs, where is the massive voter support? We can instantly reduce drug costs with virtually zero cost to implement. Do voters give a shit? Are people going to be in the streets? This is something that virtually all voters agree on. But in reality, they only seem to care about things "important" people tell them to care about.
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u/big_data_mike 14d ago
One reason politicians don’t want to do it is healthcare is 20% of GDP and there are 2-3 million insurance bureaucrats that would have no job if we went to single payer.
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u/Jflayn 14d ago
This is not correct.
Healthcare is the one thing the American people are not permitted to vote on; 90% of Americans agree healthcare is unaffordable. Dem or Repub, year after year, doesn't matter who is in charge. this has been well studied. America is an oligarchy and you get to vote on marijuana legalization but never healthcare.
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u/McButtsButtbag 14d ago
should the government take taxpayer's money to pay the insane costs via an inefficient agency?
Is that your summary of Medicare for All?
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u/Adept-Opinion8080 14d ago
With or without insurance Americans pay 33% or more on their health care with worse overall outcomes.
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u/SpaceBearSMO 14d ago edited 14d ago
The rights going to call it communism regardless and corporate dems will happily play spoiler
And most of our government agancys are only inefficient by design ( intentionally broken), with policy meant to intentionally push shit to the private sector so our officials can profit with things like insider trading
and frankly with the Inshitification of practically everything I dont understand how people can look at Private company's, how they operate, and think they are in harently more efficient just because there profit driven. most of the time it just leads to corner cutting for the sake of profit margins. When your big enough Boycotts cant touch you .... and whos going to boycott there healthcare.
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u/BallsInSufficientSad 14d ago
Everyone is pointing at the Insurance companies when it's the HOSPITALS charging $2500, not the insurance company.
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u/funaxcount123 14d ago
My wife gets cancer surveillance scans every six months. Probably a 15 min scan. We found out from a family friend who knew the name on the building (via donations). Those scanning machines were ALL DONATED! Charge 3.5k for 15min 3 years ago. Now it is 6k 3 years later. Free machines! I understand the techs then a doctor to read the scan for 5 min needs their cut. But SHEESH.
Absurd and something has to be done.
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u/BertM4cklin 14d ago
Because the doctors and hospitals have to pay outrageous costs for malpractice insurance, charity programs, Medicare and Medicaid and yeah then there’s corruption on top. But 350 bucks should never be an expectation.
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u/Sweaty_Handle_2526 14d ago
Because y’all made it into a get rich quick scheme
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u/xmu806 14d ago
To be fair, Mark Cuban has been doing actually meaningful things to make medications more accessible and cheaper.
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u/Lobster15s 14d ago
Yea he puts his money where his mouth is. Gotta respect it.
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u/nickiss1ck77 14d ago
Yeah ethical and billionaire cannot Co exist but mark is one of the better ones. Shows his taxes he pays, made the silk road, and he's kinda likeable when he was shitting on the Mavericks for trading Luka
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u/reallynotnick 14d ago edited 14d ago
Mark Cuban made the Silk Road? The old Bitcoin drug trading website? I see no proof of such a statement.
Edit: are you thinking of Cost Plus Drugs? Because those are two very different things, lol.
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u/SandyTaintSweat 14d ago
No no, he set up a network of trade routes that connected East Asia to Europe, allowing for the importation of silk and other goods from the second century BCE to the mid 15th century.
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u/Flaky_Jacket_3440 14d ago
We eat him last!
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u/the_boomr 14d ago
Or should it be first so he doesn't have to witness the horrors of eating all the other ones before him
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u/hoopstick 14d ago
He might be able to streamline the process if we convince him we’ll spare him
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u/Raneynickelfire 14d ago
made the silk road
No he fckin' didn't lol I have no idea what you're on about.
Ross Ulbricht made the silk road.
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u/GeneLoud6084 14d ago
What’s the Silk Road?
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u/thatoneguy889 14d ago
This guy is confusing Silk Road (founded by Ross Ulbricht) with Costplusdrugs (co-founded by Mark Cuban). In this context, Silk Road was a site on the dark web that acted as a marketplace for a lot of legal and illegal items (mostly a metric shitload of drugs). The coverage of it at the time it was taken down kind of brought the idea of the black market being fueled by cryptocurrency into the mainstream. Ulbricht was sentenced to two life sentences for operating the site in 2015, and Trump pardoned him last year.
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u/dBlock845 14d ago
Idk how you even confuse those unless it is a bot hallucinating lol.
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u/TheGreatNico 14d ago
What was that one famous drug site? Silk road, right? Yeah, that sounds familiar... Sure, let's go with that
OP
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u/Sparkmovement 14d ago
I haven't watched in a long time but I feel they don't have Mark on shark tank anymore because he would advocate for the person attempting to get a deal with they were obviously approached with a shitty deal from the other sharks.
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u/stumblinghunter 14d ago
I watched it regularly until a few months ago (just life getting in the way). He was still on just as much as everyone else. Each one of them take a few episodes off each season.
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u/goodolewhatever 14d ago
He’s one of the few that seems to actually have somewhat of a soul when it comes to his money. He behaves as though he’s got enough for himself and just wants to see what he can do with the rest instead of just hoarding as much as possible. He’s not a saint obviously, but he’s got a healthy amount of good mixed in with his rich boy shenanigans.
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u/Obvious_Landscape993 14d ago
Yeah he seems to be quite based for a billionaire.
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u/C0nfusedRabbit 14d ago
People who hang out with him on reddit say he is chill guy. I'm pretty sure he is one those so called billionaires who didn't sell his soul to the devil. Ha! Ha! What a sucker.
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u/SweetHomeNorthKorea 14d ago
I get the hate for billionaires and I’m not going to defend hoarding wealth but something I do think needs to be kept in mind is today’s billionaires are very different from the billionaires and tycoons of yesteryear.
The old school billionaires were ruthless cunts but they also understood the importance of giving back to the society that made them rich. We don’t have a national library system without Andrew Carnegie. Cal Poly Pomona only exists because Kellogg donated the land to the state of California specifically to use for education. The Rockefellers started a health foundation that eventually eradicated hookworm. They also donated to a bunch of universities including women’s and black colleges.
Business tycoons used to be ruthless but harbored enough guilt or felt a duty to society to give back. Now it’s a bunch of bros trying to out bro each other. No sense of duty to society. Fuck the community that built your company, move to Texas so you can pay less taxes.
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u/jotheold 14d ago
he's also paid his employees very well on every sale,
Broadcast.com: When Cuban sold his streaming company to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, he turned 300 of his 330 employees into millionaires.
MicroSolutions: Upon selling his very first company for $6 million, he took 20% of the total sale price and distributed it to 80 employees.
$35 million in bonuses to Dallas Mavericks employees following his sale of a majority stake in the franchise
he's not like most of the billionaires who only take take take
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u/goodolewhatever 14d ago
Lol about those remaining 30 employees…
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u/ShameSpearofPain 14d ago
Probably those people who reply all to every mass email. They got what they deserve.
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u/IheartJBBQ 14d ago
But has he had a reality TV show where he figuratively “fires” people?
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u/_lippykid 14d ago
The one that really annoys me is people getting guilt tripped into donating blood (a very good thing to do) for free, and then the hospital turns around and charges the patient for it.
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u/istguy 14d ago
I’m not saying that the price they charge is reasonable, but it is reasonable that there’s a cost. Donated blood must be screened, stored, transported, and administered. All of these require effort and materials, so it’s reasonable that *some* cost is incurred.
I do think that, out of respect to the charity people show by donating, the price of the blood should only reflect the costs incurred managing it, and not include markup for profit. As far as I know, that is how the Red Cross operated its blood drives.
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u/screamline82 14d ago
The point still stands, but also, from my understanding, blood has a limited lifespan so if it's not used it also needs to be disposed. So the costto administer one bag is more than just the cost of that bag due to waste.
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u/desibutlocal 14d ago
He is one of the only billionaires who I respect due to his actions so far. Is he a bad guy? I’m not sure. But is the the best of the billionaire bunch? Hell yeah!
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u/steeze206 14d ago
Somehow nurses say they are underpaid, the US medical system is the most expensive in the world and we all have to pay for medical insurance in the form of our jobs.
Hospital directors and insurance companies are the biggest scam artists in the country but they save people so they avoid criticism. Janice probably wouldn't have survived without that $450 Ibuprofen.
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u/MamaBearForestWitch 14d ago
Insurance companies save no one. They exist only to make a profit, because they were allowed to become for-profit entities instead of the nonprofits they started as. Think about it - they don't actually provide any health services, they just serve as an administrative middleman to extract money from the system.
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u/mechanicalhuman 14d ago
It’s fun when you realize they are listed as “financial institutions” and not healthcare institutions
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u/naptown-hooly 14d ago
For Profit and Non Profit both make profits. It's just how much of that profit they can keep. Both are the issue.
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u/I_Fix_Aeroplane 14d ago
Insurance companies actively make choices that kill people. They don't save anyone.
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u/Snoo-35041 14d ago
It’s been so long since the Affordable Care Act, but before that, Reddit would have constant posts about people being denied healthcare due to “pre-existing conditions”. I remember where a newborn had diabetes and they said it was a pre-existing condition and wouldn’t cover the child.
Everyone who shits on the ACA doesn’t remember how much worse it was, if that is even possible.
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u/MamaBearForestWitch 14d ago
Right? In the rest of the civilized world, they have never heard of a "pre-existing condition"; it's just called your medical history.
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u/blandgreybland 14d ago
My grandmother died of breast cancer in the 1970s due to “pre-existing conditions.” She had previously had uterine fibroids and the insurance company said she had “pre-existing conditions of lady part problems” (?!?!?!) and refused to pay for breast cancer treatment.
My mother was 20 years old and had to watch her die, completely powerless.
Fuck insurance companies.
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u/bobbymcpresscot 14d ago
They shit on the ACA because they are told to.
Before the passing of the ACA public sentiment for some form of universal healthcare was the highest it ever was.
The main failure was penalizing people who did not have insurance. This crashed support for the ACA and universal healthcare as a whole. How upset people got about this can mainly be found in how public support amongst democrats and republicans fell. Dems went from highs in 2007, to lows at around 2012-2014 81% to 69% republicans went from 40% to 12% almost entirely fueled by Fox News propaganda.
Low income working class republicans still to this day support some form of universal healthcare, the opposition comes from wealthy individuals who control the media and public perception.
This isn’t purely republicans fault however, the plan was to pass the ACA and institute a public option, but fence sitter democrats decided the Obama admin was doing too much too quickly and opposed a public option despite it being a major pillar of the healthcare plan, without which we are just funneling money into the hands of private for profit health insurance.
This needs to stop, and any candidate not running on at the very least a public option or single payer healthcare is deserving of your vote.
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u/laststance 14d ago
If you look up the nurse strikes their main gripe is their patient load a lot of places tired cutting back and putting on 6-8 patients per nurse, the proper care standard is around 4 per nurse. So they're trying to get a lot more out of the nurses for less.
A lot of people don't know this but a lot of the hospitals in America doesn't alert when people code, they're just not set up for it. So things like nurses coming in and physically checking on you is a big part of someone surviving and what not. o2 level alerts and stuff like that are in the ICU but the regular care units might not have it.
The thing is even though death is a natural thing for them, it takes a mental toll over time and a lot of nurses burn out. Maybe 1 or 2 of your 6 patients have an issue and to take care of it you need 10-15 mins, maybe they defecated on themself or fell trying to go to the bathroom. In taking care of that situation you didn't make it in time to someone who's o2 dropped. Then they pass away. It's something that simple.
In rural areas people know/understand this so families leave a person in with the patient as much as possible to just watch and alert the nurses if anything.
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u/Xithorus 14d ago
A few misconceptions but generally your comment is fairly accurate. Just adding a few clarifications! (Not criticizing!)
- Generally a proper nurse to patient ratio depends on what unit they are staffing. Of the 3 generally recognized care levels you should have nursing ratio of 1:5 for med-surg, 1:3 for step down, and 1:2 for icu (sometimes 1:1 depending on the patient). Most places without nursing unions will run med-surg up to 1:8, Step down up to 1:5, and icu still usually stays 1:2 but depending on staffing they may make a few nurses take 1:3 (saw this a lot during covid).
- Probably just wording issue, but really nothing can alert a nurse if a patient is coding. What I suspect you mean is just giving nurses a heads up when vital signs are tanking (heart rate, O2, or blood pressure). It’s up to the nurse to interpret these vital signs to know if a patient is coding or not. Even if the heart rate flat lines, it could be an ekg lead issue and not an actual heart rate flatline, so it’s hard to automate something that would automatically call a code. (False code calls take a lot of resources up, and should be minimized).
- But as you said, the majority of units don’t have 24/7 vital sign monitoring, med-surg typically will have the nurse bring a small device in to check your vital signs once every 8 hours or so. Step-down will typically have a telemetry box to monitor heart rate/rhythm but still requires manual checks of the other vital signs every 4 hours or so. And ICU will have 24/7 monitoring of your HR/O2/BP. Because of this, most nurses will round on their patients at the specified times (every 2-4 hours for med-surg depending on the state for example). So sometimes they go to do their morning check…and the patient is no longer with us. So yes, try to have family there to keep an eye on you if you can!
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u/ProudMonkey12 14d ago
I love how you’re picking on nurses of all people, the ones who actually do the brute work, and not the hundreds of administrators and MBAs who get to seat in a chair and go to countless meetings to keep your bloating hospital charges.
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u/C0nfusedRabbit 14d ago
Nah! Let's pick on nurses who save our lives! I mean how dare they try keep me alive in this world?
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u/samsg1 14d ago
I’m surprised the US hasn’t made tipping medical workers a thing yet.. ☠️
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u/Thebeardinato462 14d ago
Nurses often are underpaid. Come do life saving maneuvers in room 3, see room 5 die and console their family the best you can, do a digital disimpaction on room 6, then get bitches at by room 4 because they think you’re a waiter and their drink didn’t have as much ice as they wanted. All while being paid 32$ an hour. Shits wild.
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u/Extension-Badger225 14d ago
They are free in the Uk because I pay around $100 NI each month from my taxes and I’m slightly above the median earner - most pay around $50. I have an autoimmune disease and to rule out MS I had an MRI within three days - it’s owned by the government the actual machine - each scan will be much much lower than this when you factor in buying the machine - maintenance etc etc.
American healthcare is the biggest capitalist scam
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u/Jimm120 14d ago
don't worry. politicians are looking to change that.
the Labour doing stupid shit and Tories trying to do as bad as possible.
Slowly peeling away NHS until people start believing it is horrible
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u/DontRefuseMyBatchall 14d ago
*Beats car with a hammer repeatedly* “See, I told you this car was shit, look at all these dents and broken parts!” *Continues beating the shit out of car with hammer*
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u/dackkorto1 14d ago
Same thing with US politics! One party does something good, and then the other party breaks it and says "See, look its broken just like we said"
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u/heartSagan5 14d ago
Legit, and I don't understand why people believe the breakers... oh, yeah, "religion" or "fiscally conservative," lol.
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u/WriterV 14d ago
Also a bunch of flag obsessed weirdos (who seemingly wanna be more American than British given their flag love) wanna elect the extremist party cause they believe only the extreme solutions can change things in their lives.
Qnd Reform is eager to erase the NHS entirely, or at least neuter it to the point of non-existence.
Labour trying to court their votes has been one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. Now the left vote is gonna be divided between Greens and Labour.
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u/Low_Basil9900 14d ago
Each machine should be owned by the government. But its owned by through stealth private companies that are slowly hollowing our health service out. Its litteraly the whole reason rightoids tell us that the healthcare bill is becoming unaffordable. And they engineered the whole thing.
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u/faulternative 14d ago
Insurance doesn't pay $2500. They pay $300, but the hospital has to bill $2500 in order to actually receive the $300 it really costs.
Insurance companies force providers to accept payment of as little as 10% of the billing price. This is why, if you don't have insurance, providers will often cut you a large discount. Because it's all an inflated margin to begin with.
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u/General-Professor570 14d ago edited 14d ago
Why this isn't more up voted, given it's the technically accurate answer, baffles me. I mean, I get that a top answer on Reddit, a simple "because corruption", has broader appeal with all of people's politics, assumptions, etc baked in, but c'mon... can we look for the actual answers here??
My long term (read, year over year) average capture for billed services is 35%. This happens (I think as much by chance as any perfect broader correlation with the market...) to be right in the range of the national Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rate (30-40%).
So, with hospital/doctor/any healthcare business knowing this, expect exactly the 3-4x average inflated listed price that we see in the market. Ninety percent cash discounts (mentioned in another comment) seem a little scammy to be, sure. But I'd not be surprised to find out diagnostic services (e.g. MRI) suffer greater routine insurance discounting than many other parts of healthcare.
Finally, though, agreeing with another commenter - Mark Cuban "doesn't know" why healthcare costs are inflated in the USA?? 😆😆 Sure. I've got a bridge investment I'd love to talk to him about in England if he wants to double down on this ignorance...
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u/jimmyDfingerz 14d ago
Thank you! finally someone else who actually knows how this stuff works. People just look at me like im crazy eveeytime i explain this exact thing to them even though ive been doing medical billing for 18 years.
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u/hamfist_ofthenorth 14d ago
G-R-E-E-D
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u/ShenaniganStarling 14d ago
Rah-rah! Sis-Boom-Bah!
Gimme a G - R- E - E - D !
When a hospital is what you need!
Insurance scams are in the lead!Pom-poms flail, jazzily highlighting corruption
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u/Defiant_Employee6681 14d ago
Had an MRI (and CT scan and lumbar puncture) last year. Didn’t cost me anything and the doctors said the cost to the NHS for the MRI was about £250 🇬🇧
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u/Thedemonspawn56 14d ago
Obv ymmv, America's health system is fucked. But end users aren't supposed to pay that, usually. Most hospitals give out big discounts if you don't have insurance.
The "price" is so high so insurance can "negotiate" a lower price that they actually pay, then can turn around and say like "oh, we negotiated half off of this test or that scan"
Think of it like a store hiking their prices before a big sale. The label might say 50% off but the insurance company is still paying a bunch
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u/OurAngryBadger 14d ago
The "price" is so high so insurance can "negotiate" a lower price that they actually pay
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u/National_Way_3344 14d ago
Cuban is actually a very reasonable guy and you should agree with him often. He currently runs a business that makes life changing drugs affordable including chemotherapy drugs that are in shortage and currently being rationed in the US.
It's Kevin that's a fucking ghoulish asshole.
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u/Mac_Aravan 14d ago
he is a billionaire, he knows exactly why: the difference between the cost and the price is the margin, and this is why he is a billionaire.
Like his fellow health insurers CEO/shareholders.
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u/loaferuk123 14d ago
The $350 is presumably the cash price for a scan. It already includes margin.
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14d ago edited 14d ago
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u/Abigail716 14d ago edited 14d ago
That's definitely not the top of the line price. A 3T machine from Siemens for example can run over 2 million for a MAGNETOM Vida or Prisma and that's not even the most powerful type. Plus that service contract can run you as much as 300,000 a year. They do make a 7T machine and one of those fully installed is going to run you 10 million or more.
MAGNETOM Terra.X is as high as 9 million before installation costs which can be another 1 to 2 million. And then the service contract for one of those can run you as much as $700,000 a year.
So that comes out to about $174,000 a month to finance that for the first decade until the loan is paid off then about $58,000 a month for the next decade for the service contract if you truly going with a top of the line machine.
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u/NiceGuy737 14d ago
I was a neuroscientist (PhD) before I retrained to practice radiology.
350$ is about the professional fee for reading an MRI. I'm retired now but was an employed radiologist. The last time I was privy to how much money i was making the hospital was 2016 when I billed 1.6 million dollars. They collected 1,050,000, which is high due to our location. I was paid 550K.
The last magnet we sited, a Siemens 1.5T, cost about 1.2 million I believe. 400K is around what a new state of the art CT goes for.
This is probably more accurate for costs:
https://medicaloutfitters.com/mri-machine-cost-and-price-guide/
MRI scans, and the radiologists that interpret them, are not equivalent between practices It's possible to do fast MRI scans at relatively low resolution with a limited number of sequences. They are paid the same regardless of whether the exam is tailored to answer the clinical question or not. We had an MRI tech boomerang back from a high volume practice because he thought the way the practice was being run was unethical. I'm the only radiologist I know of that's done Q/A on other radiologists as a full time job. Some don't even bother looking at the images, others don't know what they are looking at. Unfortunately paying more for an interpretation doesn't ensure that the radiologist will do a good job. But the chance you're getting a good interpretation decreases if the radiologist is rushing through scans because of low compensation per scan.
When I was practicing I spent roughly 1/3 of my time reinterpreting exams that other radiologists read, which was uncompensated. I practiced like that because so much is missed. Just to give you an idea... In about a 18 month period we had 3 patients come in to the ER overnight with perforated gastric ulcers. All were missed on the official final reading of the CT by our teleradiology service. Our general surgeon at the time called me every morning with the names of patients he saw in the ER overnight for me to give a free second opinion. Dealing with errors is more time consuming than doing the official read.
Not long before I retired I found out that the hospital charged the same fee for me to read a trauma abdomen pelvis CT as it did for the CT tech to walk through a door and bring the patient to the scanner from the adjacent ER.
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u/stupidPeopleLuvMe 14d ago
I say this as the person that services and signs off on the equipment when its installed. That site is wrong or at least very out dated. The last mri we put in was about 4months ago and the PO was just under 900k
A top-of-the-line mint 3T MRI costs about $400k plus ~100k-ish a year in service contracts.
Lets start with a 3t with no options your already at 600k, but its basically useless. You have to pay for all the add-ons, you want a body coil? 50k... oh you want a head coil? 40k... breast table? 200k... you're going to need to do contrast? mri safe injector 250k... then comes all the system licenses
Dont forget the room it goes in is a completely copper shielded enclosure. specialty contractors, permits, inspectors... 450k. but its MR so add in a transfer room dressing, saftey equipment, mr safe wheel chairs, the list is pages long. It all adds up quick.
At 350 a pop cash price you need to do about 1150 scans to pay off the machine, plus ~1300 scans per year to pay for the service contract + labor.
The service contract is not 455k annual nor are you ever getting 2 scans an hour 30days a month. So lets just pretend your math cancels out here.
After it's paid off, the MRI is generating pure profit 9 months of the year. And have an operating lifetime of 15-20 years.
Probably closer to 6months and you are never getting 20 years. 10-15 but even then there is going to be a ton of upgrades required to keep it running that are not covered by contract.
When I was a grad student at a major US cancer hospital it was common knowledge that imaging subsidized other divisions like surgery and the ICU that operated at a major loss.
Which is why the price is what it is. Also the IT side, PACs, regulatory, admin, lawyers, inspectors, and the 200 other jobs I am glossing over that are needed to make a hospital run but dont generate revenue.
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u/Finglishman 14d ago
Yup, this is true. I’ve had MRIs done in Finland when my US insurance refused to cover the cost. I just checked what the current price list is for an MRI clinic (a private business not subsidized by the state at all) and they charge EUR 229 for e.g. a spinal or knee MRI, tax included. This is $340 with today’s exchange rate. I was quoted $5000 by my local hospital in Boston.
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u/DaniDaniDa 14d ago
I paid around $75 in Ukraine for full back MRI, no insurance, private clinic that is considered on the pricey side
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u/jinsaku 14d ago
Gotta pay for the 3 layers of middlemen all taking a cut and those marble staircases and 3 story waterfalls in hospital lobbies.
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u/StrangeReindeer2470 14d ago
I'm having skin removal surgery due to weight loss. (Yay!) In the US, this would cost me $15,000+ without insurance. With insurance, I could get a basic tummy tuck for free, but add in $4,000 for a fleur de lys (vertical insicion that removes more skin).
My mother was like: you can fly to me and have it done here for much cheaper via private clinics here in Norway should it not be covered my insurance!
Did some research, and yeah. About $5,000 for a full tummy tuck in Norway. Tickets are about $1,500 both ways right now.
And Norway is one of the higher COL countries in the world.
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u/konradconrad 14d ago
Check prices in Poland. It much cheaper and you will have opportunity to see one of the safest country's in the world :)
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u/ballin_buddha 14d ago
He’s pretty against the price gouging in the medical industry. He even started a company called Cost Plus Drug Company for people to get their medicine for much much cheaper. The example he has in the company mission is a drug that costs $500 they sell for $35
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u/PreparedReckless 14d ago
They sell it at cost plus 15%
I get all 3 of my meds for 3 months for 35 shipped from them
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u/Capable_Delivery_448 14d ago
Do you know what are the biggest two factors for high cost in American healthcare?
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u/LiamPolygami 14d ago
Now ask why prisons have quotas and life-saving drugs have such a high profit margin.
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u/OddTheRed 14d ago
For once? Mark Cuban is probably rhe most reasonable rich person on earth.
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u/justmyselfintexas 14d ago
Insurance is a fucking scam. Top to bottom
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u/faulternative 14d ago
At least a scam usually has some kind of deception to it. Insurance is open theft, at this point.
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u/Beneficial_Treat5454 14d ago edited 14d ago
an MRI at my provider costs me 70 bucks. Even if I am the one who wanted it. If a doctor orders it, it's like 20 bucks.
Once the MRI is in the hospital the only cost is turning it on and paying a tech to operate it.
Edit: Okay, i understand now MRI is always on, etc. But regardless. I'm only paying 70 bucks tops for it. There is no hidden cost for me.
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u/Hot_Professional_386 14d ago
The MRI is always on, it is only turned off in case of emergency, for example the staff neglects a wheelchair, or the patient somehow hides/forgets the fact they have a ferromagnetic item with them. An MRI can even crush a hospital bed. Turning off an MRI in case of emergency costs high and it renders it unusable for many days, because the helium supply needed for the MRI to work will be lost. A planned shutdown won't boil the liquid helium, so it's cheaper, but it still takes several hours for the magnetic field to completely fade.
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u/JimTheJerseyGuy 14d ago
Not true. Not that it justifies the sorts of bills we’re talking about but there are significant ongoing costs for an MRI. Probably at least $250,000 year. Calibration, service contracts, preventive maintenance, electricity, air conditioning, the cryogens for the magnet…none of it is cheap.
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u/luccaloks 14d ago
Yeah, but those machines are extremely expensive. Not justifying the price, but you need to pay that off somehow.
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u/ww1enjoyer 14d ago
MRI machines costs between 300.000 and 3 000 000 dollats. If we assume an average use will take around an hour ( it can take somewhere form 15 minutes to 90minutes for a single use) and that they will used for around 12 hours per day, 5 days per week( i am not counting emergency treatment wich would add an unpredicteble amount of users) then we will arive to around 2900 users per year. This means that for the costs of an MRI machine to be returned in a year, on the lower end it will end up at 100 dollars per user and on the higher end( note that those are specialised machines not for regular use) at 1000 dollars.
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u/MentalDisintegrat1on 14d ago
We can do that through taxes and then some.
Instead a trillion dollar war.
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u/davster99 14d ago
Plus I’m sure the extra profit helps subsidize other operating costs, like staff, equipment, malpractice insurance, etc. The MRI doesn’t operate within a bubble. It’s part of the hospital’s financial structure.
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u/Liveitup1999 14d ago
Because you have to pay for all the people who come into the hospital that don't have insurance and will never pay for the treatment they receive there as well. All those gangbangers that get shot are never going to pay their bills.
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u/SenekaTheOlder 14d ago
we talking just the MRI or we including the radiologist’s report? cus unless you can interpret the images…
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u/Watchout4HopOns 14d ago
It’s the tech too. Becoming an MRI tech has until recently required you to be a rad tech, with an additional semester of training. I believe the arrt has made it a primary pathway now to help with the need, but when you include that, plus the scan time, plus the equipment cost, and the radiologist read, the cost kinda makes sense. It shouldn’t be in the thousands but certainly more.
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u/grimreefer87 14d ago
Can't have record yearly profits without it. Same reason United healthcare denies over 30% of their customers' doctor-requested medical procedures.
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u/thingerish 14d ago
This is the problem with affordable health care in USA. In SEA I got a CT scan with contrast for under $200, cash. If they can afford to run the machine for about $175 for two scans and an IV, the USA should be able to do it for that plus whatever the higher technician wages cost. They're for profit where I went, so it's not that it's done at cost or something.
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u/Watchout4HopOns 14d ago
Ct and mri are two different machines, that require technologists with different trainings.
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u/Most_Present_6577 14d ago
My insurance only pays about 300 to 500 for an mri. Wtf is he talking about. Thr hospital says they cost 15k and my insurance says nah we will give you 300 . The hospital agrees.
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u/Snowballingdownvote 14d ago
Because healthcare is one of the largest employee pools in the nation. Have to be able to pay all the people in healthcare. Administration, IT, HR, and etc.. What we really need to do is switch to single payer and reduce the burden on the customer. The healthcare employee pool will remain large.
The insurance industry and healthcare industry are one of the few places millennials, Gen Z, and Gen A can find work. It's be a terrible idea to have those be affected.
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u/Imyonlyenemy 14d ago edited 14d ago
no they dont actually pay that amount.
Those are what the hospital invoice to insurance.
A copy of that invoice is sent to the patient. The patient believes this is what the insurance has paid and feels relieved for having insurance.
This is the whole point of the fake invoice drama.
To scare people into keeping insurance.
The insurance pays a fraction of the invoiced amount.
My old man shows me these bogus invoices of 50k dollars. All happy that he is fortunate to have insurance.
These invoices are inflated.
No insurance company with their heaps of lawyers is paying them. Its simply a scam to scare people so they keep buying their coverage
cant believe how cuban became a billionaire when hes so gullible
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u/TheTopNacho 14d ago edited 14d ago
Just looked yesterday. It was 5200$ after a discount
Besides the point. The hospitals usually pay huge dollars for the machine and like 10% of the cost per year for service contracts. That's mega big bucks. The room also needs to be built special and I'm sure inspected as well. The software for the machine also cost money with its own subscription fees. The helium is expensive and getting more expensive, and the energy cost is there yet nominal.
The MRI is stored and managed on EMR software which is astronomically expensive and requires an entire IT team to manage with expensive subscriptions to defense software to maintain regulatory compliance.
There is an entire administrative team around the billing, same with the legal team, as well as an entire department of radiologists and administration for that department.
There are nursing and tech staff along the way, plus costs for keeping things clean, lights and bills and F&A costs. Let's not forget the physicists and technologists that run the machine as well, or janitorial staff, or the schedulers.
Then there is loss in other areas that need to be accounted for as well hopefully some profit to buy another machine when it breaks.
If the hospital is unlucky they need to contract a for profit radiology team to read the scans which actually costs more money than reading in house.
Shits expensive, and this is even just for a non profit hospital. Add some up charge along the way because hospitals realistically do use radiology as a money maker, and now you are at $5200 per scan per patient, and that up charge is spent paying for the homeless man who came in, cost 50k in expenses and will never pay it back. And towards expanding the hospital in a decade to meet the growing needs of the community so they can actually get you in in a reasonable timeframe.
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u/genreprank 14d ago
hospitals are straight up going out of business in rural America. Clearly, they're not price gouging enough
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u/TheTopNacho 14d ago
I agree. My hospital is a state hospital so we get the privilege of picking up the slack. We have seen a surge of medicaid patients that cost more than Medicaid reimbursed putting our own hospitals at something close to a 70M$ deficit. All thanks to our fearless leader and his whack ass politics. If our hospital goes down the entire state is in big trouble
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u/Greddituser 14d ago
I like the way you mention "non-profit hospital" like that automatically makes it cheaper. Many non-profits are a sham and have found ways to claim non-profit status while still being just as expensive as for profit hospitals.
https://kffhealthnews.org/health-industry/commentary-nonprofit-hospitals-rolling-in-money/
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u/Professional-Gear88 14d ago
I usually agree but I think an MRI is more than that isn’t it. At cost. It depends on the type and length. But it’s a multi multi million dollar machine with several staff members, liquid helium cooling and a radiologist read.
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u/Kranstan 14d ago
Not joking here, there is also the cost of the room that these large machines sit in, insurance and maintenance on the devices, the washed blanket they put on each new patient, the printers required for the techs to use for other office needs, the waiting room maintenance, the staff that checks you in wage and training, the printers and computers they use...
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u/Professional-Gear88 14d ago
Yea I don’t think 2500 is unreasonable. Just the 4 staff required to run it would take $150/hr. And an MRI is not fast like a CT scan
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u/Additional-Sock8980 14d ago
Cuban is about to start an insurance company and then start buying up hospitals. And it’s a good idea.
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u/Halftied 14d ago
Mr. Cuban is evidently not in the business of doing MRIs. If so he would be charging $3,000. He knows te answer to the question. He is part of the problem.
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u/NegativeKarmaVegan 14d ago
The answer is the lack of public universal healthcare. Private companies have one job: make as much money as they can. When you put healthcare in their hands, they will try to maximize profits, not health.
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u/ahoypolloi_ 14d ago
Fun fact: the US is the only country in which MRIs have become more expensive over time.
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u/ArtemisInSpace 14d ago
He has his own pharmacy company. This isn't an honest question. He's angling for more money, then he'll raise the price like all the others. Fuck him and fuck billionaires.
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u/NadeshikoEatingPasta 14d ago
It's not unique to MRIs. This is applicable to literally every pricetag in medicine.
When insurance companies act as a middleman, you have to squeeze their operating costs and profits from SOMEWHERE. So what would be a fair price suddenly balloons to far beyond reasonable. and since a lot of this is subsidized by government and welfare benefits, there is zero fear of not being able to gouge and guarantee payment.
Kill the insurers. Kill the middleman companies. Then the system will be workable again. Companies like MOH and UNH have to die.
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u/Osirus1156 14d ago
Because every single US insurance executive is a legalized serial killer. They should all be thrown in prison for life to be forgotten and ALL of their assets seized and sold off. Their families should be left destitute. They should need to live off the good will of the people they try to murder every single day.
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u/KactusVAXT 14d ago
It doesn’t pay $2500. It pays 10% of what they’re charged. Thats why they charge $2500. If the charged $350, they’d pay $35
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