The average day spent in a U.S. hospital costs anywhere from 6 to 25 times the cost of staying in a hospital for a day in the world's other industrialized nations. Maybe that's because we have cable television in the room? It's actually hard to imagine what could account for such a wide disparity in prices. What happens if we take into account the average length of stay and take a look at the average hospital stay?
Surprisingly, the gap narrows slightly. What does this mean? That patients in U.S. hospitals have, on average, shorter lengths of stay than they do in other industrialized nations. It's not possible to tell from these data whether the difference is statistically significant, or whether there's any relationship between length of stay and quality of outcomes, but if we want to feel better about ourselves as a nation, I suppose we can take pride in the fact that we seem to keep people in the hospital for less time than other countries do. Hooray!
UPDATE: People are somewhat confused about the source of the data and the fact that for some countries, values of "0" are reported. First, I'd point you to the beginning post in this cost series, which explains where the data come from. As for the "0" problem, this is merely an artifact of the way in which these countries finance their health care system. For example, in the UK, the government owns the hospitals, and the financing for this comes from tax revenues, so there's no direct charge to the individual for hospitalization. I will readily admit that this makes the comparison somewhat meaningless -- please do not interpret the zeroes to mean that hospitalization doesn't cost anything in the UK or Germany. It certainly does. It just gets paid for by the citizens as a whole, rather than by the individual. (I know, I know, how socialist...)
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My understanding is that here if you have a c-section, you are out in 48 hours,,,In France, you stay in the hospital 10 days that is right, 10 days.........A hospital is about nursing care where ever you are...and the nurses here get around $25 per hour overall, and in france they get a bit less, but they also get 6 weeks of vacaction and no worries about healthcare insurance....
Why exactly are the costs so high in the US again? Especially with the week dollar, shouldn't it be the other way around?
The irony of our ignorance and the duplicity of our elected "representatives" leaves me speechless at times. This is one of them. Just posting to say "I can say no more".
to bill private pay patients at a higher rate than those who are insured, for the
same treatments and rooms. I found this out the hard way (we have catastrophic
insurance only, and have never filed a claim on it, I was paying out of pocket.)
When I protested my bill, the clerk inadvertantly told me, "well, if you had insurance
your bill would be lower". I thought she meant that MY 'co-payment' would be lower.
Obviously.
But that was not what she meant. The bill itself would be lower, because I had insurance.
Nice catch-22 there !
We need single payer now. Everybody gets charged the same amount for the same procedure, everybody's bill gets paid and nobody goes broke trying to afford medical care.
But for some reason our hospital (it's the only one for hundreds of miles)
outsources its emergency room physicians and they work for someplace in Timbuctoo.
So I had to wait six weeks or so for the ER physician's bill to arrive.
That doctor spent a grand total of 30 seconds assessing me and another
30 seconds telling me the diagnosis (arrived at by the hospital, he was just
reading the chart), which was such gobbledegook that the nurse had to google
it after he left and give me a printout from some medical info page.
For that I was billed $360 dollars in doctor's fees. Never did pay it.
But I got permission from Accounts Receivable to ignore it. Go figure.
There is more going on here than you want to know...It is kind of like the Assisted care facilities, charging 4 grand a month for a dinky apartment with a god awful kitchen and food and cleaning...that is over 130 per day...each and every day...for an apartment that would cost $1000 and care that they are paying at minimum wage split over 100 people and crappy food....
How is it possible for the UK to have registered a 0 for Avg Cost per Hospital Day
and for Germany to have registered a 0 for Avg Cost per Hospital Stay?
What is the source for this data?
This could be interesting, but I'd like to know what I'm looking at.