Ms. Rosenthal, a journalist, and physician is a contributing opinion writer
It’s easy to criticize pharmaceutical and insurance companies. But we spend much more on hospitals.
As voters fume about the high cost of health care, politicians have been targeting two well-deserved villains: pharmaceutical companies, whose prices have risen more than inflation, and insurers, who pay their executives millions in salaries while raising premiums and deductibles.
But while the Democratic presidential candidates have devoted copious airtime to debating health care, many of the country’s leading health policy experts have wondered why they have given a total pass to arguably a primary culprit behind runaway medical inflation: America’s hospitals.
Data shows that hospitals are by far the biggest cost in our $3.5 trillion health care system, where spending is growing faster than the gross domestic product, inflation and wage growth. Spending on hospitals represents 44 percent of personal expenses for the privately insured, according to Rand.
Opening this link will bring you to an interactive map representing reimbursement differentials between private payer insurance companies and Medicare.
A report this year from researchers at Yale and other universities found that hospital prices increased a whopping 42 percent from 2007 to 2014 for inpatient care and 25 percent for outpatient care, compared with 18 percent and 6 percent for physicians.
So why have politicians let hospitals off scot-free? Because a web of ties binds politicians to the health care system.
Every senator, virtually every congressman and every mayor of every large city has a powerful hospital system in his or her district. And those hospitals are as politically untouchable as soybean growers in Iowa or oil producers in Texas.
Opinion | That Beloved Hospital? It’s Driving Up Health Care Costs - The New York Times:
No comments:
Post a Comment