ER spending way up, even as number of visits is down
What is going on?
A new report uncovers a troubling trend: Spending on emergency rooms increased by $3 billion from 2009 to 2015. However, the actual number of hospital bills fell.
It is more expensive to visit an emergency room today than it was six years ago, Vox reports.
Why is this happening?
The problem is related to facility fees. What’s that? It’s a charge each patient receives simply for walking through the hospital door. Patients are typically not told about this fee (until their bill arrives). It is in addition to charges for any care the patient receives.
And these fees can run from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Vox, an online news organization, partnered with the Health Care Cost Institute to analyze the facility fees for 70 million emergency room bills. They focused on the amount the insurance companies paid to hospitals.
The fees are usually coded on a 1-5 scale, depending on the complexity of the care the patient received. In most cases, hospitals are coding visits as more severe, which brings a higher charge.
“Emergency rooms all across the country are increasingly using these higher-intensity codes,” Vox’s Sarah Kliff reported. “We found that the price of these fees rose 89 percent between 2009 and 2015 — rising twice as fast as the price of outpatient health care, and four times as fast as overall health care spending.”
This is likely to have a trickle-down effect on premiums and benefits, Niall Brennan, executive director of the Health Care Cost Institute, told Vox.