The government has identified hundreds of hospitals whose Medicare patients are incurring especially high bills, a first step toward using bonuses and penalties to encourage more efficient care.
The new Medicare figures show wide variance among hospitals around the country, even ones just a few miles apart. In Los Angeles, for example, the average patient admitted to Los Angeles Community Hospital cost Medicare nearly $24,644 during the stay and in the month afterward, 37 percent above the national median. Across town, according to the data, an essentially similar patient admitted to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center cost Medicare $17,628, or 2 percent below the median.
Read the full story: http://hcp.lv/IW18yg
Source: Kaiser Health News
Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Read More