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Saturday, December 14, 2013

Study: Hospital charges the largest driver of medical inflation

ABC World News reported on “outrageous hospital costs” and “expensive and wildly confusing bills.” The segment focuses on one women who had the same tests performed at two different facilities and then received bills asking her to pay very different amounts. ABC’s Rebecca Jarvis said, “With so many hospitals, doctors, labs and insurance companies negotiating rates confidentially among themselves, patients are at their wits end.”

        In a 3,500-word story front-page story titled, “As Hospital Prices Soar, A Single Stitch Tops $500,” the New York Times (12/3, Rosenthal, Subscription Publication) also reports on high hospital costs and hospitals’ often confusing billing patterns. The “prices for any item or service are set by each hospital and move up and down yearly, and show extraordinary variability, health economists say.” The primary cause of “high hospital costs in the United States, economists say, is fiscal, not medical: Hospitals are the most powerful players in a health care system that has little or no price regulation in the private market.” The article points out that “hospital charges represent about a third of the $2.7 trillion annual United States health care bill, the biggest single segment, according to government statistics, and are the largest driver of medical inflation, a new study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found.” The Times also discusses how emergency departments have, in many cases, become “profit centers.”

        Reuters (12/3, Jegtvig) reports that patients often have no idea how much a medical procedure costs until they have been discharged from the hospital, and a study published online in JAMA Internal Medicine indicates that it would be difficult to find out beforehand. Investigators attempting to obtain price quotes for an electrocardiogram from hospitals in the Philadelphia area. The researchers found that just three of the 20 hospitals provided a quote on how much the test would cost.


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