Word: generality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Prices of the most routine facilities and treatments are staggering. Samples: in 1969 Massachusetts General Hospital charged $80 a day for a semiprivate room. Now the bill is $189 a day. Ten years ago, a baby could be delivered at Manhattan's New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for $350 in hospital bills, exclusive of the obstetrician's fee. But when 6-lb. Priscilla W. was born there in a fine uncomplicated delivery, she cost her parents $2,800?more than $450 a pound?$1,300 of that for the hospital...
...growing number of policymakers, including Carter and Kennedy, are convinced that the nation must slow the surge in health costs as part of any effort to control the general inflation that saps the economy and erodes the dollar. But any attempt to do so must be based on a clear understanding of why those costs are so high in the first place, and that understanding is not easy to acquire. The economics of medicine are so unlike those of any other market that even many doctors and hospital administrators find them illogical. Says Dr. David Thompson, director...
...Hospitals are inherently expensive places. They must maintain elaborately equipped facilities?emergency rooms, for example?24 hours a day, even though those facilities are used only sporadically. They are labor-intensive: the general ratio is 2.64 employees for every hospital bed. Aggressive unions have forced hospitals to raise the once depressed wages of their nonprofessional people (cooks, cleaners, clerks) so sharply that, for example, wages and benefits now take 70% of the budget of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, vs. 35% only 20 years ago. The introduction of expensive machinery raises rather than lowers labor costs. For example...
...this year's bill, hospitals would be given until Jan. 1, 1980, to show that they can voluntarily hold down the increase in their costs. Controls would go into effect only if hospitals fail to keep their average annual increase to 9.7%, plus an adjustable figure to compensate for general inflation. That is hardly a stingy rise. Even so, more than half of the nation's nearly 6,000 community hospitals, mainly those in small towns and in states with effective cost control laws already on the books, would be exempt from controls. The country's 1,200 other hospitals...
Once the mandatory controls are in effect, the Government would have the power to require that the fees received by hospitals from their bed patients be limited by a complex formula based on general inflation, local wage levels and each hospital's efficiency. The Government would order Blue Cross, Medicare and Medicaid not to pay a hospital more than the specified increase. Hospitals would be required to set aside part of the payments they received from private insurance companies. If these payments exceeded the prescribed limit, the hospitals would have to reimburse the insurers. If they failed...