Nonetheless, hospitals like Stamford are able to use their sympathetic nonprofit status to push their interests. As the debate over deficit-cutting ideas related to health care has heated up, the American Hospital Association has run daily ads on Mike Allen’s Playbook, a popular Washington tip sheet, urging that Congress not be allowed to cut hospital payments because that would endanger the “$39.3 billion” in care for the poor that hospitals now provide. But that $39.3 billion figure is calculated on the basis of chargemaster prices. Judging from the difference I saw in the bills examined between a typical chargemaster price and what Medicare says the item cost, this would mean that this $39.3 billion in charity care cost the hospitals less than $3 billion to provide. That’s less than half of 1% of U.S. hospitals’ annual revenue and includes bad debt that the hospitals did not give away willingly in any event. read Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME
Posted on: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 12:57:18 +0000
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