[galaxytachyon]

The cost of healthcare is unlikely due to data management cost. That is almost an absurd comment.

The cost to develop a drug is in the billions. Manufacturing costs are in the tens to hundreds of millions. Locking down some server and implement better security would be a drop in a bucket.

And even if it was more expensive, the biggest pharma megacorps are a fraction of the size of the like of tech megacorps. If the chumps down the street can do it as a side job, why can't the big boys whose entire business is supposedly about data and software can't do better?

[const_cast]

Also the data management is not even that stringent in the US. Your health data is shared with literally hundreds of third-parties and you consent to it. HIPAA doesn't protect against that, it protects against your boyfriend finding out your diagnosis.

[throw10920]

> The cost of healthcare is unlikely due to data management cost. That is almost an absurd comment.

I did not state that it was solely due to that. Please read my comment carefully:

> ...and one of the side-effects is that it contributes to the insane price of healthcare.

Meanwhile, this is a crazy red herring:

> The cost to develop a drug is in the billions. Manufacturing costs are in the tens to hundreds of millions.

The cost for smaller practices and procedures that have nothing to do with drugs or manufacturing has skyrocketed.

It's not very hard to understand that the primary cost of regulation is on smaller businesses and practices. Regulation imposes a disproportionate cost on smaller organizations, leading to consolidation. This is a bad thing. The results of regulation can be a net benefit if you reduce those costs while maximizing the positive effects. This should be incredibly obvious.

Moreover, this is a rather uninformed claim:

> Locking down some server and implement better security would be a drop in a bucket.

That's not how HIPPA works. HIPPA prescribes that you have to use certain HIPPA-compliant services and technologies. That's not a cost burden - that's a compliance burden. It's not enough for your systems to be secure - they have to be HIPPA-compliant, which is so insanely difficult for small practices to do in-house that it forces all of them to use large, expensive, complex medical platforms, and pushes many others to consolidate with larger hospitals in order to amortize the overhead of managing these systems. And guess what? Consolidation in markets without extremely strict anti-monopoly enforcement leads to higher prices and worse products and services.

Yes, the cost of actually running the servers is very low. But that's almost never the primary cost of regulation - that's straight-up factually false. The primary cost of regulation is the overhead of compliance.

That's why any sane person strives to maximize the security-efficiency product, or the analog in whatever area you're trying to regulate.

There's literally no excuse for not trying to do this, or for defending the idea that we shouldn't take efficiency into account when designing regulation, except malice.

> If the chumps down the street can do it as a side job

Yes, and as is incredibly obvious to everyone, healthcare is orders of magnitude more expensive than services provided by those tech megacorps. This is evidence (even if weak), that bad regulation makes things more expensive, not less.

> why can't the big boys whose entire business is supposedly about data and software can't do better?

You clearly did not read my whole comment. I'm not arguing that regulation isn't necessary. I'm pointing out the fact that you have to optimize the security-efficiency product, and NOT do what HIPPA does, which is maximize security at the cost of a very high amount of efficiency to the point where it infringes on patient rights.

The only absurd comment here is the one that did not actually read what it was responding to, and is mostly composed of red herrings, claims that don't line up with reality, and logical fallacies.

[const_cast]

The insane cost of small business is because of the existence of a private insurance industry. There's thousands of insurers and you need to work with a lot of them. Every single thing you do needs to be authorized and ran through them.

They decide your medications you can prescribe, when you prescribe them, who can have them, how long your visits will be, when you should have those visits, how many visits you need to make a diagnosis, and on and on and on and on. Every single detail - multiplexed across thousands of insurers.

So, you need administration, and lots of it. The system is so horribly fragmented that all hopes of efficiency are lost. A single-payer solution is orders of magnitude more simple, and thereby more efficient. A lot of problems just go away when you only have one person doling out recommendations, one person doing care, and one person paying.

Also, the doctors who are making most of the decisions around your care aren't the doctors you go to. It's dozens of doctors, mostly nameless, working for your insurer making those decisions. How this isn't considering practicing medicine is beyond everyone.