Hospital finances in 2022: Outlook is grim

Based on some recent reports, hospital finances in 2022 look poor. Government cash infusions from COVID-19 were helpful during the pandemic but have largely disappeared. At the same time, costs for labor and supplies have risen. Adding on to these financial pressures is the recent rise in the number of RSV cases. According to a…

Impact of hospital closures on rural economies

Not surprisingly, the impact is significant. That is according to a study by Malone et al. (2022), estimated using a difference-in-difference design with data between 2001 and 2018. Specifically, they find: Of the 1759 nonmetro counties in our study sample, 109 experienced a hospital closure during the study period. Relative to the nonclosure counterfactual, closures…

340B Court Cases

The Public Health Service Act (PHSA) in 1992, created a program to allow hospitals providing care for underserved communities to be able to access discounted drugs. The program–known as the 340B Drug Pricing Program, has been described as follows: …[The] law requires pharmaceutical manufacturers participating in the Medicaid program to enter into a second agreement…

Few Americans research hospital prices

New regulation is making hospital prices available to patients. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) reports: As of January 1 of this year, hospitals are required to post prices of common health services on their websites via consumer-friendly tools for patient use. Prior to implementation of this rule, hospitals were only required to publish their gross,…

Transparency and hospital prices

Health care costs are high in the U.S., making up 17.9% of the U.S. economy. The Economist reports on recent key drivers of US health care cost…and the answer isn’t drugs. Mr Trump has correctly identified a big villain behind health-care cost inflation, and it is not Big Pharma. Hospitals account for over 30% of…

Are HRRP’s readmission reductions an illusion?

A number of studies (e.g., Wasfy et al. 2017, Desai et al. 2016) have found that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) reduce hospital readmissions. However, are these findings valid? A recent paper by Ody et al. (2019) argues maybe not. Because readmission rates are risk-adjusted, changing coding…

Do we need Hospital Compare if we have Yelp?

This is basically the question that Perez and Freedman (2018) ask.  They find the following: Among crowdsourcing sites’ best‐ranked hospitals, 50–60% were also the best ranked on [Hospital Compare’s] HC’s overall and patient experience ratings; 20% ranked as the worst. Best‐ranked hospitals had significantly better clinical quality scores than worst ranked hospitals, but were not…