Hospitals: Cheapskates, Charities, or Both?

 

Here’s a health-care Rorschach test, courtesy of a recent analysis of hospitals charges to the uninsured. Are hospitals hard up, collecting only 39 cents for every dollar they bill? Or are they bullies, billing the uninsured $3.07 for every dollar that Medicare would pay for the same services?

Both, naturally, says Gerard Anderson, professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins, in an article in the current issue of policy journal Health Affairs.

But Anderson tells the Health Blog that from the point of view that matters most to patients, hospitals’ “ratio of charges to costs has just gone up and up and up.” Crunching Medicare data from 2004, Anderson found that hospitals have been raising their list prices an average of 10.7% a year since the mid-1980s; Medicare rates – a proxy for actual costs – have gone up more slowly, at about 6.3%.

Lawmakers, or the courts, may force some hospitals to set rate ceilings for the uninsured. “The most obvious” solution, Anderson notes, “is to provide health insurance to the forty-six million uninsured Americans.”

Source: Health Blog : Hospitals: Cheapskates, Charities, or Both?