| The rate you're talking about is extremely deceptive. People may pay a 500$ bill over time, but not a 50,000$ one. "hospitals uncompensated care costs -- medical care for which no payment is received -- jumped nearly five percent to $41.1 billion in 2011" And that's just for 0$, they also get paid >0$ but less than full costs which is a separate number. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2013/01/07/unpaid-h... Numbers for the same time period: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/12-statistics-... • Total net revenue: $821.3 billion
• Total expenses: $756.9 billion
• Cumulative profit: $64.4 billion Critically, it's only hospitals in prosperous areas that are doing well and those see a much lower percentage of unpaid bills. Medicare is basically break-even, but hospitals need a lot of profit to offset these write-offs. PS: Having trouble finding public sources for total write-offs. But this is from 2005 (As a result, hospitals
write off 40-50% of what they charge.) http://classic.ncmedicaljournal.com/wp-content/uploads/NCMJ/... |
It's not; I'm not sure why you'd assume I'd be talking about the sheer number of bills that default (at any size) as opposed to the amount of bad debt (which is closer to the relevant figure).
> Medicare is basically break-even
Medicare is not even close to break-even. From the very first page of the link you provided:
> For the first 18 years of Medicare's existence, the program paid hospitals for the "cost" of the care provided. However, since 1983, the payments have been slowly declining in relationship to the actual cost of providing care, and now hospitals are receiving less in payments than the actual cost of the care. How do hospitals recover this shortfall? Simple: they pass it on to other payers.
The amount of money that hospitals need to make to overcome this shortfall, both the operating expenses and the amount needed to cover the overhead, is a few orders of magnitude greater than the amount of noncollectable debt from uninsured patients.