Yeah I think the big problem here is related to the scale, not the fact that it's cheaper when you pay in cash. But that insurance would pay $500 (after negotiating the price down) and then push a > $1k charge to the patient when the clinic would have been ok with a $500 payment up front is just wrong.
It's also worth noting that many clinics, if not most, won't actually try to collect the balance here. They'll often go through the motions and forgive the balance after some number of attempts to collect.
One of my favorite things about the US insurance market is that the lack of transparency into pricing actually hurts both the insured and the institutions providing care.
Small and medium size practices have very few guarantees about how much they will get reimbursed for a procedure and the patient has no idea how much they will pay. It's truly insane.
Is anyone honestly trying to solve those problems right now?
I have an idea of how to improve transparency, similar to how some insurers provide more information to patients regarding the cost of an MRI at different places in town. However, it requires healthcare consumer buy in at a larger scale, with potential privacy hurdles.
I'm not entirely sure if it would have the intended effect of reducing costs, but it would definitely add more transparency.
Hrmm...not sure most of what you said is true. Small and medium business may lose claims, but they know the reimbursement for each procedure and if thier claims are legit, they will get reimbursed. There's a requirement to share how much a consumer needs to pay before procedures are done also. Unless your talking about ER care specifically, that's a different beast where you are somewhat correct.
I think he is definitely talking about ER but I’m pretty sure you don’t get the up front cost for random doctor visits or procedures. They simply collect your insurance information and then tell you that the insurance will send the final outstanding balance. This happens regardless if you have enough coverage or not.
I recently visited an Emergency Room and the whole process behind is really obscure.
Like for example, I got a bill from the health care provider for an owed amount and one letter from the insurance company saying that I owed the healthcare provider another different amount. They are not even close.
The whole experience in the ER was pretty fast and high quality but I feel they did a bunch of extra blood work and stuff just for the sake of getting more money out of the insurance and not necessarily because it was needed.
The way I see it the healthcare system in the US is just designed to squeeze as much as possible from the carriers and viceversa but without thinking too much who is the actual liable party which happens to be the sick individual.
I think this is how we ended up with a super expensive healthcare system that bankrupts people. All parties involved (insurance carriers, healthcare providers, healthcare product suppliers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors) think that the opposing party in any transaction is swimming in money so they optimize for squeezing the shit out of the other. That’s how you end up with ridiculous bill items like $1500 dollars for a simple fluids IV.
There are hundreds of medium-size providers that do Urgent Care & Walk-In Clinics. So maybe my error was generalizing ER. I'm speaking about going to an urgent care clinic and then being remitted to an actual ER. Either way, I have never been charged upfront or given a cost beforehand in neither of those.
Recently had to take my son to the hospital. It started in the ER, but he was then admitted to the pediatric ward for a few days. There was nothing, not a thing, that changed in pricing disclosure for procedures and tests between the two. Neither in the ER nor the pediatric unit was any price or any money ever at all spoken about. The closest it ever came was when the admiting clerk in the ER took the insurance card. Now, a few months later, come the bills, and fighting with insurance over partial or no coverage for miscellaneous line items.
Used to do medical billing. How is this not true? Your telling me doctors are running their businesses with just some random returns for procedures? are you out of your mind?
Also, it is true that thier is a requirement for estimates. Granted, insurance companies can turn down procedures - but like I said, if it's a competent diagnosis than it works out.
But you can just ignore all the words in my post to be dramatic, that's fine.
I work in the industry. Fee schedules are an upper bound, but the lower bound is very hard to get numbers on and often approaches 0.
If I go in for a procedure at a medium sized specialist clinic they are going to take the fee schedule for this CPT, discount by my 20% expected contribution (or whatever), and then hope that the insurer pays them > 50% of the remainder.
A lot of the time my insurer will, but not always. Bigger systems negotiate their own fees and many doctors at larger clinics only track RVUs for each procedure (specifically because the clinics realize that paying based on insurance payout isn't fair or scalable, in that way RVU allocations act as a pool). But overall it's not a transparent system for the majority of people working within in.
From the early/mid 90s all the way into the early aughts there was a subculture in punk and hardcore dedicated to veganism and straight edge. The majority of them acted exactly like this and I can only imagine how insane things would have been with YouTube available at the time.
People wrote obituaries for other people's edge when that person started doing drugs (often at 21, almost always before 30). There was even particularly militant scenes in certain parts of the country that would get violent if you were smoking or wearing a leather jacket to certain shows.
Some really, really good music got made around it all though
This feels like pseudoscience dressed up as the real thing.
"Getting stronger only takes 13 minutes three times a week" starts off with a reference to a recently published paper that looks promising, but the second paragraph is about the author's personal belief that high intensity/slow motion workouts are the best for you. There's no real connection between these two paragraphs except that they both prescribe shorter weigh lifting sessions.
"You can improve your body's function and alleviate anxiety in two minutes a day" again lists someone's personal take on dealing with anxiety and stress. While deep breathing is certainly helpful they don't site any peer reviewed papers or clinical studies that say 2-4 minutes of deep breathing a day will impact your heart rate/blood pressure/anxiety much less do it via increasing alpha waves.
"Cutting out sugar..." is similarly good intentioned (almost everyone should eat less sugar than they do, myself included) but again cites nothing meaningful.
Also this damn site somehow popped up two autoplaying audio/video ads, one of which I could not see or get rid of. Rage inducing.
I am no expert but I tend to read a lot of studies and interviews/talks with Phd's regarding fitness, and the consensus is that the most important predictor for muscle growth is volume (time under tension). That is, the longer your muscle fights the load, the more you grow, provided you have sufficient nutrition and rest.
Everything else (time of the day when you work out, number of repetitions / series, specific exercises, etc) is secondary and seems to only matter insofar as it allows you to stay more time under tension...
So I'd be VERY sceptical of anyone who claims you can have great results in X minutes a day.
With that said, it takes very little time under tension for a newbie to stimulate growth. But that effect doesn't last for long.
The cited study specifically says that muscle growth (hypertrophy) does improve with volume, from 1 to 3 to 5 sets, but that strength gain doesn't differ significantly. There's a lot of conflation between hypertrophy and strength. You can be strong without being big (up to a point) and vice versa.
This reinforces what strength athletes have said for a long time. The point was that in this short study, strength came from intensity (weight lifted) and size came from volume. (Hence a powerlifting program might have 3 sets of 3 to 5 of 5, whereas bodybuilding programs have much higher volume at lower weight.)
This isn’t surprising; strength gains are substantially neurological. Over time, though, you still need more muscle to move heavier weight.
I know a some powerlifters, and their personal size varies with their volume (and whether or not they want size). Some are deceptively small for the weight they can move. That being said, you can’t deadlift 500 pounds without putting on some significant mass, either.
True, in general amount of strength is correlated more with the amount of weight lifted, while ability to exercise for longer shows a more positive correlation with longer, smaller weight sets - and hypertrophy sees similar results with both methods given equal time under tension.
But the title specifically states "to look and feel better", and strength alone won't do much in regards to a persons' appearance.
I'd also like to know the starting point of the study's subjects. Although the study does mention "healthy resistance trained men", I'd guess that they were starting from a state that was low enough to achieve strength gains with relatively low exposure to weightlifting.
You are correct IMHO. We've already done this fad in the 70s when it was called HIT. It was junk science in the 70s, and it still is today. however, any training is better than no training.
Unfortunately, the author cherry picks the studies (eg. [0][1]) to get the narrative she wants, even though the research groups were small to begin with (n=34 and n=18 respectively) and were quite different (trained men[0] vs just older individuals[1]), etc. etc. etc.
the four listed are the biggest products in the world in their space. the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google.
not to mention Search itself, Docs has become a fantastic product as has Photos. of course they have killed hundreds of potentially great projects (RIP Reader) but give the company their due - they know how to build products.
>the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google
Gmail got popular because it's free (and had large space for a free client). If it wasn't to be outside of Google, it would make an insignificant amount of money through ads, or started to charge (in which case users would flee).
Ditto for Chrome. There are 4-5 free browsers, nobody would use a browser that's not free (a required for it to be a multi-billion dollar company). At best they'd sell their search bar default setting, like FF does, which is less than a billion IIRC.
Gmail would not be a multi-billion dollar company. It doesn't make money (remember they don't target ads on email content anymore). You'd have to roll in Google apps for business to get to the money making part.
Chrome definitely isn't a multi-billion dollar company. There is no revenue stream there. Firefox only exists by selling the search bar and being a non-profit.
"the first three would be multi billion dollar companies
outside of Google"
I think this is the problem. Google does not care about products smaller than that. They will happily shut down a product because it's too small, even though it would be a reasonably successful business on its own.
However, "reasonably successful" is not good enough for them.
This sounds like pure marketing to me. Statements like "Cockroaches are also a raw material in traditional Chinese medicine, known to be able to promote detoxification" and "found that chickens fed with the powder were not only healthier but also grew stronger and faster than normal chickens" without citations sets off all sorts of alarm bells.
And I don't know a ton about this area in general but it seems like if you are separating the organic compounds from trash then compost centers would be the real alternative (rather than landfills)?
Don't know about the chinese medicine, but insects chewing organic matter can be better than compost if you don't have a lot of dry carbon (paper, twigs, leaves whathaveyou). If you just let lots of fruit rot, you get anaerobic decomposition, which is slow and releases lots of methane (greenhouse gas) not to mention smells like rotting fruit. Can't compost meat without some real disease issues either.
I've got a friend with Black Soldier Fly larvae eating his leftovers of all kinds. Raw meat, pineapple, it all gets turned to dirt. Insects are magic.
I would love it if newspapers/media outlets had to attach a bibliography or some form of citation. Unfortunately not only is it not common practice, I'm not sure that I've ever seen one. I only see citations in scientific papers.
I understand that the term "growth hack" isn't well defined but still - most of these are just old school marketing techniques used by tech cos. A few novel ideas worth learning from but that's about it.
When I first heard about growth hacking back in the day, as distinct from typical marketing, it was defined as engineering the product itself to propagate to new users. The “classic” example at the time was building social features into programs - Eg, spotify’s social integration.
Thing is, to the best of my knowledge, it (a) never really grew to anything beyond social integration, and (b) was soon expanded in scope to just mean “all marketing by people who wish they were in Silicon Valley,” and subsequently to “all marketing.”
But it had a real definition behind it at some point.
I agree. Growth hacking was putting features into the product so that use of the product would inherently serve as influencer marketing and social signaling by its very nature. Think 'ask your friends for goods' from early Farmville that was required to play at a high level, the first action when joining LinkedIn being to invite your other professional contacts to LinkedIn, even way back to the "free email with Hotmail" signature watermarks so everyone receiving your email learned about Hotmail. This was considered novel because it provided a mechanism for truly rapid growth for companies with plenty of active users but very little or no incremental revenue to justify the advertising spend to acquire them. The idea was how to do marketing without paying for advertising, and what did we do to every problem in the 2000's: hack it!
Now its just any new or novel marketing idea from anywhere if the returns are superior to traditional marketing, which is fine, but what is the term now for products with growth features built in?
Marketing is a dirty word to technoligsts. It implies the product needs manipulation to gain adoption... growth hacking strategies have been used by direct response marketers for over 100 years... while it originally was about piggybacking off an existing network of users and merged into data driven lean startupy tactics and eventually spread to all types of marketing...its intent was always the same...to give a new cool word to technologists so they dont have to feel dirty about doing marketing...
The truth is, everything that touches a prospect or customer is marketing. Treating your employees well is marketing. Your product is marketing. You are marketing...everything that impacts a decision to buy, even indirectly, is marketing...
It never was a dirty word...but as a marketer, I consider growth hacking to be a dirty word nowadays :(
Read the book Growth Hacking which is quite clear about what the definition is. The idea is to have a cross functional team focus on a specific metric eg. user engagement or churn. And then rapidly prototype and experiment with different techniques to drive the metric in the right direction.
It is just a new name for a combination of existing practices. But then again so is Agile and it changed the way software companies worked.
Even by that definition, this list doesn't make sense. There was no "cross-functional team focus[ing] on a specific metric" for the ice-bucket challenge. Cash incentives (PayPal example) have been around for decades—that's not a growth hack.
This is a list of marketing strategies and tactics that happened to work for these particular companies/individuals.
"Growth hacking" was always, since the very inception of a term, just rebranding of "marketing" in a way that makes it sound cooler. It's just a purified buzzword. In the tech space, having yourself called "growth hacker" was seen as more cool than "marketer".
I think it was intended to very very high return marketing that was inherent to the use of the product itself, as distinct from traditional marketing where the product was the thing being marketed (selling auto parts) and not the thing doing the marketing (advertising in your free email signatures).
I know dozens of growth hackers and their skills are simply different to traditional digital marketers. It is far more experimental, technical and cross functional. And it will continue to evolve into its own space in the future.
People who think growth hacking = marketing are just as clueless as those who think influencer marketing = Instagram. It's far more involved than that.
They are generally less physically attractive. I was shocked the first time I visited a traditional advertising/marketing company's office.
Edit. Growth hackers are the less physically attractive :) I was shock how beautiful the advertising/marketing people were - there wasn't one average looking person (male or female) in the place apart from me.
Honestly cannot figure out who “they” are in your comment. Who looks better in your opinion, traditional marketers or growth hackers? Were you shocked by how good they looked or how bad they looked?
Every time I start to assume you meant one of them, I get nervous wondering if your shock was pointed the other way. Lol.
I don't think this is a widely agreed definition, I think its just the definition the author provided in the context of that book because it fits the framework the author wants to consult with companies to implement. :-)
Far too much fear mongering content online already, thanks for keeping it informative!