A hospital shouldn’t do have to do marketing. They should focus on providing health care.

Even in a fully public, NHS-like system, they do. Come to X hospital, no need to go to [big city] for your [surgery] when you can have it here - well, if they don't do this, people will go to the [big city], and if it goes on long enough, the NHS-like system will cut their funding and possibly reassign surgical specialists away due to lack of activity. That leaves the smaller city with less access to healthcare, even if it's free to the user at the point of service.

[EDIT: my karma is now 667. Would someone please remove their upvote just for a bit? A screenshot of "devilbunny (666)" from HN would be a great little digital memento.]

The only marketing a hospital should do is by publishing quality metrics and cost. That’s all patients need to know.

While outcomes will be better, each interaction will be more painful. Taking your parent to an appointment need not take a full day, but if it is two hours’ travel each way….

Here's a downvote :)

Thanks, but two other people found something else I wrote worthy in the meantime. Urgh. I mean, I could lose points easily, the hard part is only losing one or two, not forty. Um, emacs and vi are both pretty useful editors and there's really no big difference when you get used to one of them? I mostly like pico for editing?

[karma whirring up and down could power a small city]

Just use the browser dev tools to change it to what ever you want. And then take the screenshot.

Cheating. And I'm actually not a developer, so I had to look up how to open dev tools.

I believe that this comment is unintentionally the reason healthcare is broken in America.

America is capitalist and federalist. That means either hospitals are for profit entities, non-profit entities or government owned entities.

Ducks quack, for profit entities attempt to grow profits, non-profit entities attempt to grow donors and government entities attempt to keep the things way they were yesterday.

As a society, we can pick which models we allow and in which allocation, but we can't ask a duck to be a swan - each option has positives and negatives.

When we ask for the positives without the negatives, then complain when the inevitable negatives come, is the fault with the model or with our expectations?

The better way is to iterate and grapple with the rewards in the system and where transparency should be forced or legislated. Change the incentives and you'll change the behavior. Unfortunately, you will also encounter new and unexpected negative effects...see: ducks quack.

Privatizing and moving to for-profit hospitals has been a boon for PE. All this attention on patient outcomes is just slowing down the inevitable transition. /s

Legislation is in order to define what analytics companies cannot do with data from ANY site.

While the TFA might be about hospitals specifically, your suggestion that we need regulation should not be focused on just healthcare/HIPPA type situations. These data hoarders need to be reigned in if not just eliminated.

I'd rather see any kind of data legislation be an allowlist, not a denylist.