Saturday Links

Posted on by John C. Goodman

A benefit of wildfires: they make temperatures unseasonably cool.

Study: CMS delay in approving treatments for Alzheimer’s disease impose a social cost ranging from $13.1 billion to $545.6 billion. Part of these losses stems from increased private and public healthcare spending ranging from $6.8 billion to $284.5 billion.

Hospital finances: profits and cash reserves are up; charity care is not.

Another SS horror story: Social Security demands return of $6,000 from an 81-year-old widow for mistaken payment 45 years ago.

2 thoughts on “Saturday Links”

  1. The article on charity care vs. profits is incomplete. The issue is very complicated (like so much else in health care!)

    1. In most places, hospital charity care is limited to the uninsured. (The patients with high deductibles and/or claim denials need help too, but that is usually not counted as charity care.)

    Anyways, the number of uninsured has fallen over the last decade. The ACA subsidies and the expansion of Medicaid has reduced this group.

    (Places like California have many undocumented uninsureds, and the Deep Southern states who have not expanded Medicaid also have many uninsureds.)

    Anyways, fewer uninsureds mean less charity care, without implying meanness by hospitals.

    2. I do not pretend to know what is an adequate or an excess “profit” for a non profit hospitals.
    Many of them do have enormous reserves and maybe they should be forced to give more discounts. How you would legislate that is beyond me.

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  2. Hospitals have been shown for decades to offset losses in “charity care”, by increasing prices for patients who can pay – mostly insured patients.

    When private manufacturers do the same, e.g., warranty costs, they do not pretend it’s charity.

    I know of no businesses other than hospitals that charge some customers’ bad debt to other customers, and then tell you it’s “charity”.

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