This is the first time I disagreed with an article- clearly the author has never operated a hospital. Clearly hospitals are NOT efficient and have a lot of work to do but the author fails to mention that 20% of hospital patients are covered by Medicaid that pays 65 cents per dollar of cost and 35% of patients are Medicare that pays about 80 cents per dollar of cost. Much of the crazy mark-ups referred to in the article are the result of the need to subsidize underfunded government patients as well as 'self pay' patients not to mention the unilateral decision by the payers to stop providing first dollar coverage and turning providers into debt collectors. Over-simplifying the complexities of hospital economics ultimately hurts patients because we do not get to the root causes of the problems -
This is the first time I disagreed with an article- clearly the author has never operated a hospital. Clearly hospitals are NOT efficient and have a lot of work to do but the author fails to mention that 20% of hospital patients are covered by Medicaid that pays 65 cents per dollar of cost and 35% of patients are Medicare that pays about 80 cents per dollar of cost. Much of the crazy mark-ups referred to in the article are the result of the need to subsidize underfunded government patients as well as 'self pay' patients not to mention the unilateral decision by the payers to stop providing first dollar coverage and turning providers into debt collectors. Over-simplifying the complexities of hospital economics ultimately hurts patients because we do not get to the root causes of the problems -