Word: costs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...given day. Then the hospitals must charge more than ever to cover the cost of maintaining those empty beds. A case in point: New York City spent $200 million on its ultramodern 510-bed Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, then found it had a city wide surplus of some 3,000 beds. But since the city would have to spend $20 million a year to mothball the "dream hospital," it plans to put it into operation eventually, at a cost now estimated as high...
That might not be the case if the insurers and government bureaucrats who pay the bills kept a sharp eye on costs. But they do not. The Blue Cross movement, which affiliated with the American Hospital Association in 1937, has not rigorously questioned hospital bills until recently. Congress, when legislating Medicare and Medicaid, tacitly agreed to forget about cost controls as part of a bargain to keep the medical profession from opposing the program. Instead, one of the ways the Government reimburses hospitals for the care of Medicare-Medicaid patients is on a "cost plus" basis, and it asks...
...Some insurance practices operate directly to drive up costs. Many insurance companies will pay for lab tests only if they are done in a hospital on a supposedly sick patient. The result is to encourage hospitalization of untold thousands of people who could be diagnosed and/or treated at far less cost in a doctor's office. Says one Houston physician: "Say a man in his late 30s to early 40s complains of chest pains. I tell him he needs a thorough physical. In the office my fee would be $45, the tests $250, for a total...
...enough to insist that new technology should be subject to rigorous cost-benefit analysis, but if a new machine costs, to be hyperbolic, $5 million, and saves one life in ten years, who is to say the price is not justified? Asks Dr. David Thompson of New York Hospital-Cornell: "If you decide to do without some product of the new technology, which one would it be? And are you willing to take the chance that it won't be available when you, the patient, need...
What then can be done? The experience of other industrial nations offers little comfort; many of them are struggling with medical-cost problems too. In West Germany, where most medical bills are covered by insurance companies supported by tax funds, doctors charge so much that their incomes average $100,000, far higher even than in the U.S., and medical costs consumed 12.8% of G.N.P. last year. The government, reluctant to raise taxes further, is pressing doctors and hospitals to hold down charges...