Health Affairs’ June Issue: Markets, Prices, And Incentives

The June issue of Health Affairs, a variety issue, includes a number of articles examining how health care markets function — and how the policies that set prices create incentives for behavior, both desirable and undesirable. Another featured article examines incentives for public health in an area close to many of us: reducing teen driving fatalities. The Top Fifty Highest-Markup Hospitals: Forty-Nine Are For Profit In the United States, individual hospitals establish billing rates for services, which are not subject to any limit in most states. These rates are often several times the Medicare-allowable costs. Patients going to out-of-network providers, casualty and workers’ compensation insurers, and the uninsured are expected to pay these rates. Ge Bai of Washington & Lee University in Virginia and Gerard Anderson of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore used 2012 Medicare cost reports to examine the fifty US hospitals with the highest charges relative to their costs — hospitals that charge, on average, more than ten times their costs. The study found that all but one operate for profit, and twenty of them are in Florida. Few of these hospitals are in states that place any restrictions on allowable hospital charges. A chart of the geographic distribution of these hospitals is below. A list of the hospitals, ranked by charge-to-cost ratios, appears in the study’s Appendix. Distribution Of The Fifty Hospitals With Highest Charge-T...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Costs and Spending Elsewhere@ Health Affairs Featured Global Health Health Professionals Hospitals Medicare Payment Policy EHRs PEPFAR Teen Driving Source Type: blogs