this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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I might have missed it but I don't see anywhere that talks about health insurance and medical companies that sell medical consumables/equipment.
It's so hard to know insurance coverage. Call your insurance company and ask how much you have to pay out of pocket for a procedure. They could give you a quote but also say don't quote them because they don't know. Healthcare facilities have a hard time figuring out which insurance companies are in network and which procedures are covered.
Companies selling medical consumables increase their prices about 10% EVERY YEAR. Now add annual Medicare reimbursement cuts to that. Medicare is already the golden standard. If Medicare cuts their reimbursement on something, it's likely insurance companies will as well. We aren't in a system with some doctor price gouging because they want to get rich. Most likely they have a hard time staying afloat and competing with the healthcare corporations.
You have conglomerates like CVS who own health care clinics, pharmacies, deep investments in pharmaceutical companies and own Aetna health insurance. Full circle healthcare. Do they pass all these savings down to their patients? Idk but I'm guessing the money they are saving is massive compared to the price reduction. The bigger the company the lower prices they pay because they have better contract negotiating power.
Anyway, it's just another Friday. Same sh@% new day.
One of the (many) reasons the medial device and supplies companies can get away with it is because a) healthcare is treated like a market when in reality the purchaser isn't the consumer, and b) very few insurer/providers are big enough to exert market pressure against those annual increases.
Drop the decentralized fee for service mess in favor of a managed care coverage-for-all model, and both of those problems go away.
It would also help if there was an incentive for these companies to provide quality care through feedback of real patients. Like some kind of significant incentive where they would realize their automated phone system doesn't work. That's just the first place I thought of though
That's what I meant by a managed care model. Fixed reimbursement per capita with minimum coverage requirements and incentive bonuses for quality, service, etc.
Ah I see. I did a little AI research on this. Apparently hospitals in the USA have a form of this approach. Obviously a flawed system but it's called Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) and the surveys only make up a portion of the VBP program.
Large hospitals select 300 "random" patients a year to survey. That can be done through a company or the hospital can register to do it themselves.