Do Hospitals “Cost Shift” to the Privately Insured when Medicare Reduces Prices?

Many health policy experts believe that when Medicare or Medicaid decrease prices, hospitals will increase the prices they charge to the privately insured. Does this make sense?  Ginsburg (2003) summarizes the debate: Most executives in hospitals, physician organizations, health plans, and businesses have long been convinced that reductions in rates paid to Medicare and Medicaid…

Surgical Complications and Mortality Rates

Mortality during surgery is dependent on two factors.  The first is the probability of having complications during surgery.  The second is the probability of dying conditional on having a complication.  One would expect that hospitals with low mortality rates would have both fewer complications and lower probability of death conditional on a complication.   A…

Dutch Hospital Industry

What are hospitals like in the Netherlands?  A paper by Blank and Van Hulst (2009) give some insight.  The paper studies Dutch general hospitals.  These hospitals make up 80% of beds on 70% of hospital costs.  Non-general hospitals include academic hospitals and specialty hospitals (e.g., eye clinics and rehabilitation clinics). Hospitals in the Netherlands “Hospitals,…

Economic Woes Hit Hospitals

Four months ago, I wrote that the health care sector added jobs despite the overwhelming job losses in the rest of the economy.  Looks like the health care sector has not been fully insulated against the economic woes: ” Six out of ten hospitals nationally are seeing a greater proportion of patients without insurance coming through…

Costing Methods

How do hospitals estimate the cost of different inpatient stays?  A paper by Clement et al. (2009) reviews 3 techniques: Microcosting. “With microcosting, a detailed list of each component of a patient’s care is created and costed separately for each facet of a patient’s hospitalization. Given the level of detail, microcosting is generally considered the…