This just in (errr… for the government, “just in” means insight into data ending 2 years ago) via Theo Francis of the WSJ.com blog: Hospital charges are up 89% since 1997. Yawn.
Oh, wait-a-minute?! You mean the price that the working uninsured and (to some discounted degree) people paying for care out-of-pocket has shot up eighty-nine percent?!
YES.
Now of course there are all kinds of caveats and “buts” to the above statement such as “Nobody pays billed charges.” I would agree that nobody SHOULD pay billed charges (that’s like paying the MSRP when purchasing a car) and yet, the reality is that the majority of consumers use “billed charges minus some sort of discount” as their barometer of fairness since they historically have had NO FREAK’N IDEA what the avg reimbursed rates were for their given Provider for that particular admission. Therefore, when billed charges increase, so does the price paid when based on a discount off charges. Sadly, consumers have never had the right information to reasonably informed decisions [i know, i know, that is what change:healthcare is fixing as well as many other Health2.0 ventures].
Anyway, I thought that Theo did a good job summarizing AHRQ’s December 2007 data review…
The nation’s hospital bill has arrived, and it’s a doozy: $873 billion in 2005, up 89% since 1997, according to work by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.The federal AHRQ study measured charges — the hospital equivalent of a car’s sticker price, which few actually pay in full. Still, the prices show the upward trend for hospital spending. The annual increase in hospital charges was 7% compared with 2004.
But the Health Blog was struck by some of the big-ticket conditions. (See the full report.)
The data from 2005, the most recent year available, show that pregnancy and delivery ranked No. 2 among line items, at $43.9 billion, while newborn infants came next at $35.3 billion. … (Coronary artery disease ranked No. 1, at $46 billion.)
… As a group, the top-20 conditions — which account for about half of all hospital charges — rose 67%.
UPDATED:
ohhhhh man, I just had to come back include these interesting comments made by WSJ readers…
America needs to wake up and realize that heart disease is still its biggest health problem. The country should be very angry that while our system happily pays for nearly each and every hospitalization/procedure, it invests almost nothing in prevention of heart disease and so far has been unwilling to pay for good prevention. Instead, we bitch and moan loudly about the cost of our statin or ACE inhibitor going up a few $$ a month, but we’re silent when the insurer pays a $30,000 bill for the heart attack we just had. The fact remains that drugs account for about 10-12% of overall healthcare costs, and hospitalization accounts for over 60% of total healthcare costs. Time to turn the system on its ear and actually pay more system-wide for prevention so that we can decrease hospitalizations costs in 1-2 years.
Comment by Dr. Remulac – December 14, 2007 at 9:12 am
Ask any hospital administrator why costs are so high and the answer is the same: Bad debt/charity care for the millions of uninsured and underinsured (WHO do you think is taking care of the app 13 MILLION illegal immigrants and their children?) and ever-increasing staffing costs (heaven forbid a union moves into your hospital). And yes, nothing annoys health care providers more than lazy, excuse-making patients that expect the physicians to fix all their problems, all the time and accept no personal responsiblity at all. There is a bill before Congress to improve health care literacy starting in elementary, secondary, high schools, vocational schools, community centers and houses of worship. This would be helpful to getting people to become more efficient users of the health care system and about health insurance generally. At the end of the day, health insurance is insurance like car, home, life, etc. It is there for emergencies only- not prevention.
Comment by First Anonymous – December 14, 2007 at 10:36 am