Author of Casino Healthcare w/ bylines in Forbes, Newsweek, re/code, Techonomy and healthcare specific publications.
Phoenix, AZ
Joined June 2008
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Pinned Tweet
Why should the same hospital charge $17,000 to one insurer and $55,000 to another for the same C-section?
We argue endlessly about WHO pays for healthcare.
Maybe it's time to ask WHAT we pay.
Different payers. One price.
hc4.us/sp
#SinglePricing
Dan Munro retweeted
People who say Medicare for All would wipe out private health inurers should study where most Medicare recipients get coverage.
Dan Munro retweeted
Setting an unattainable objective. I wish it would come true, but curing all these diseases in the next 10 years is impossible.
And I'm very optimistic about the impact of AI for improving health.
Dan Munro retweeted
Paul Christiano (OpenAI board member) yesterday:
"There's material risk of AI takeover in the next 6-12 months.
We have seen roughly the things we might expect to see shortly before something really bad were to happen.
Even with [any] realistic policy responses, the risk remains exceptionally high.
If we build this as quickly as we can in the easiest way we can the chance is [more like] a coin flip [within the next 3 years].
For most people in this room, the most likely reason they will die is because of an AI accident."
Christiano:
• Is on OpenAI's safety and security committee (which exists to block risky practices)
• Co-invented RLHF at OpenAI back in 2017-2021
• From 2024-2026 was head of safety at the US gov's AI agency (now called CAISSI)
(Video is from 'The Hinton Lectures' there's another on tonight and tomorrow.)
Dan Munro retweeted
Dozens of countries across the globe guarantee their citizens universal health care. In America, we’re stuck paying some of the highest amounts for care that still leaves millions behind.
It’s time for us to change that and get to universal coverage.
FWIW: Cigna doesn't pocket unused premium $'s as pure profit.
The payer-rage is legit - but we're still ignoring who sets pricing for a $50K surgery or a $100K NICU event or a $1M cancer treatment - b/c that's not the insurance company.
hc4.us/sp
My new 2027 healthcare premiums for just my wife and I are $2,271.22 a month... $27,254.64 a year... with a $7,600 deductible. No kids, just us. This is an HDHP "low premium" plan.
So I have to pay $34,854.64 before ever receiving a dime of benefits from my insurance carrier, and Cigna pockets $27k of pure premium profit if I don't go to a doctor.
This is completely insane. Just tax me at 10% for Medicare and call it a day. The US privatized healthcare system is an abomination.
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Dan Munro retweeted
Here’s a classic play on government price controls. Trump hatches an MFN scheme that holds pharma to prices paid in a basket of other developed countries in exchange for being let off the hook on tariffs. Pharma then holds back new drugs from European governments to avoid the benchmark and prices them higher in the US to make up for the loss of revenue in those other countries. US pays more, Europe’s lag in new drug adoption worsens. Patients everywhere are treated like pawns.
wsj.com/health/pharma/trumps…
Dan Munro retweeted
This is spot on. now.fordham.edu/campus-and-c…
More "pricing transparency" is a popular battle cry in healthcare but its a big distraction b/c it solves for information asymmetry and that's not the problem we have.
The problem we have is bargaining power asymmetry.
Just seeing a price isn't agency to influence it.
“If you don't know how much something costs, you can't shop around for a better deal.” - @Sonderling47 📣
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Dan Munro retweeted
Insane that 11 Democrats couldn't even bother to show up for an impeachment vote after the actual voters rejected the Iran War. What is going on?
Dan Munro retweeted
They passed a law that said corporations are "people."
Then they passed a ruling that said spending money is "speech."
Then they said you cannot limit speech.
Therefore, a corporation spending $300 million to influence an election is a person exercising their constitutional rights.
This is not a metaphor.
This is Citizens United v. FEC, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2010, the law of the land, the operating architecture of American democracy.
Follow the logic and it’s airtight.
Question the premises and the entire thing collapses into what it plainly is:
A legal framework constructed, over decades, by people whose interests were served by constructing it, to convert unlimited money into unlimited political influence while calling it "freedom."
The vocabulary did more work than any lobbyist.
The vocabulary was the lobbying.
Dan Munro retweeted
One of the best charts I've seen explaining how health insurance costs are silently choking workers. If your job gives you a 4% raise, health care sucks away one-third of it. Food, gas, etc. feel more expensive because health care is devouring your salary. masshpc.gov/sites/default/fi…
Dan Munro retweeted
This is exactly the conversation we need to be having. Healthcare affordability isn’t just about who pays, but how reimbursement rates are negotiated and established. When the same service commands vastly different prices, we need to ask: Are we paying for the cost of care, or the negotiating power of the payer?
Dan Munro retweeted
This post and the attached article should have 100 million views.
Get it to @mcuban or someone who can run with it 🏃
Dan Munro retweeted
We’ve spent 80 years arguing about how many payers the system should have. The question that actually decides your bill is how many prices it has. Same C-section, same hospital: $17k or $55k depending on your insurer. Same cancer drug, same dose: $12k or $43k depending on the building or payer.
That’s not a broken system. That’s the design. Tiered coverage is how variable pricing gets delivered, and the complexity is what keeps you from questioning it.
Fix the number of prices first. This piece by @DanMunro on this is one of the best I’ve read on healthcare reform this year. danmunro.substack.com/p/why-…
Dan Munro retweeted
I'm not interested in investigating people just because I don't like them. I want to investigate them because I suspect they've put our national security at risk, they've been breaking the law, and they are lying to the American people.
Single-payer isn't likely - or necessary - but single pricing is.
hc4.us/sp
HAMILTON: “I don't think Medicare for all is the right approach. And even though it sounds great, I don't think it's going to pass… I think what we need to do is figure out, how do we ensure that everyone has access to affordable health care, no matter who they are? But I think even using the term Medicare for all alienates a whole group of people that we need to be able to pass some kind of health care reform that allows everyone to have affordable health care.”
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Easy to highlight overall majority, but there's strong M4A opposition in that same KFF poll:
"Most Republicans oppose the (M4A) proposal (66%), including about half (48%) who 'strongly oppose' it."
Time to shift focus from # of payers to # of prices:
hc4.us/sp
Dan Munro retweeted
Confirmed --this really happened. They were not authorized to do it and the purpose is unclear.
Let this sink in: ICE agents reportedly blocked the emergency entrance of a Los Angeles hospital for TWO HOURS, forcing ambulances carrying people who needed emergency care to go elsewhere.
This isn’t law enforcement. This is a reckless abuse of power that put innocent people’s lives at risk.
An ambulance entrance is not a political battleground. A hospital emergency room is not an immigration checkpoint.
And federal agents do not get to hold an entire community’s access to emergency medical care hostage.
Imagine being in an ambulance, fighting for your life, only to be diverted because federal agents decided their operation mattered more than emergency access.
Where is the humanity? Where is the accountability? And where is the line that these agents are no longer allowed to cross?
You cannot claim to be protecting America while putting Americans’ lives in danger.
This isn’t making America great. It’s making America cruel. And anyone defending this should be ashamed.
