[refurb]

It's much easier to offer estimates for specialist clinics.

In hospitals? The honest answer is they often don't know the true costs. They'll know the costs specific to a department, but the "shared" costs of the hospital, staff (who work across departments), etc are a major shit show.

That's not to say they can't find out, but it's not easy and frankly they don't do it because they don't have to.

[prepend]

They don’t need to know the true cost. They just need to estimate well enough to break even. They do tens of thousands of procedures each year.

The podcast goes into this concept and their hospital isn’t a specialist clinic, they do everything a hospital typically does.

[SkyPuncher]

They don't know the true cost for the full stay, but they certainly know the likely daily cost.

[refurb]

They don't.

You might get an operation in a hospital and stay one night. They could tell you the cost of the bed, but what about the lab tests (which is another business unit). Then you've got nurses who might work across two different units. Then imaging which is another unit.

My friend who worked at a major hospital said it's a massive shit show. For simple out-patient procedures, they have the costs down pretty clean. But for in-patient stays, they often have no clue at all what the real costs are.

[prepend]

They know on average. How else would they project how big of a hospital to build?

It’s a massive shit show because they don’t care. There’s no cost incentive to be efficient. And many healthcare providers are cost plus so if they have higher costs it actually results in higher absolute pay.