PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Christopher Fleming
Phone: 301-347-3944
Email: cfleming@projecthope.org
Website: www.healthaffairs.org
BETHESDA, MD, USA -- HEALTHCARE UPDATE NEWS SERVICE(TM) - JANUARY 19, 2006: “U.S. Hospitals: Mission vs. Market” is the title of the January-February 2006 issue of Health Affairs.
The table of contents is at: http://content.healthaffairs.org/current.shtml.
The first section of the volume describes the challenge posed to hospitals by the new millennium’s hypercompetitive environment and demand for price transparency. Empirical evidence suggests that hospitals have quietly cross-subsidized less profitable services with the revenues from more profitable services. But if payers on the more lucrative side of the equation realize what is going on, decide they don’t want to continue paying extra, and have options to avoid doing so, how will hospitals continue to pay for burn centers and emergency rooms, or for services to groups like the poor and uninsured?
The lead article (http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/1/11) in this section, by Stuart Altman, David Shactman, and Efrat Eilat, discusses how America’s traditionally dominant airlines entered bankruptcy, or simply ceased to exist, when deregulation and low-cost competitors prevented them from pursuing their own versions of cross-subsidization. Faced with similar pressures, “U.S. hospitals could begin to resemble U.S. airlines: severely cutting costs, eliminating, services, and suffering financial instability,” the authors warn.
The next section of the volume describes the evolution and confusing operation of the hospital pricing system. In their “chargemasters,” hospitals list prices for tens of thousands of different services, with each hospital allocating various costs to different departments and services in its own unique and inscrutable way.
To top it all off, say Christopher Tompkins, Altman, and Eilat in their article on the precarious hospital pricing system (http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/1/45), fewer and fewer payers actually pay the charges listed in the chargemaster. During the past quarter-century, the ratio of hospital charges to payments received has grown from 1.1 to 2.6, forcing hospitals to squeeze ever greater amounts out of ever fewer remaining charge-based customers, such as the uninsured.
The volume also deals with such topics as the issues surrounding specialty hospitals and the effect of consumer-driven health plans on hospitals. This includes the following:
The issue was supported in part by grants from the Federation of American Hospitals; AdvaMed; America’s Health Insurance Plans; the Council on Health Care Economics and Policy; GE Healthcare; Johnson Controls; Johnson and Johnson; and MEDLINE.
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