Bitter Pill: The Exorbitant Prices of Health Care. Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us. New Efforts to Close Hospitals' Revolving Doors. Joshua Lott for The New York TimesSue Koner, a transition care manager for Sun Health, checks Ted Cohn’s blood pressure to try to prevent his readmission to a hospital for a heart condition.
In the past, the only thing a patient was sure to get after a hospital stay was a bill. But as Medicare cracks down on high readmission rates, hospitals are dispatching nurses, transportation, culturally specific diet tips, free medications and even bathroom scales to patients deemed at risk of relapsing. Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., has nurses visit high-risk patients at their home within two days of leaving the hosital. Teresa De Peralta, a nurse practitioner who runs the program, said they frequently find that patients don’t realize a drug they were prescribed in the hospital does the same thing as one they have already been taking. Recent Fiscal Cliff Legislation and the Implications for Occupational Therapy. Health Costs: How the U.S. Compares With Other Countries. How much is good health care worth to you?
$8,233 per year? That’s how much the U.S. spends per person. Worth it? That figure is more than two-and-a-half times more than most developed nations in the world, including relatively rich European countries like France, Sweden and the United Kingdom. On a more global scale, it means U.S. health care costs now eat up 17.6 percent of GDP.
A sizable slice of Americans — including some top-ranking politicians — say the cost may be unfortunate but the U.S. has “the best health care in the world.” But let’s consider what 17 cents of every U.S. dollar is purchasing. In the United States: There are fewer physicians per person than in most other OECD countries. There’s a bright side, to be sure. This week on the PBS NewsHour broadcast, health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser will explore one hospital system’s unusual approach to improving performance while reducing costs — one based on Toyota’s assembly line model for manufacturing cars. What 'Health Care Costs' Really Means - Shannon Brownlee, Joe Colucci, and Thom Walsh.
Framing our problem in terms of "costs" is a misrepresentation of the real challenge -- how to slow the increase in spending. tombothetominator/Flickr No fiscal policy event is complete without the plaintive cry that health care costs are out of control.
The phrase has become a form of rhetorical boilerplate that is often used to imply that policy makers are helpless in the face of market forces, and that the only way to reduce "costs" is either cutting benefits or rationing. Let's take a look at what the phrase "health care costs" really means. It turns out, everybody uses the term to mean something different. And cost is just one more of the terms that means something different depending upon who happens to be using it.
In the interests of clear communication, we propose three distinct definitions for three words: cost, price, and spending. Price is how much the hospital pays for the scanner, or how much an insurer pays the hospital for the patient to get the scan.