BACKGROUND 2002 marked the first time that the rate of hospital spending in the United States out-paced the overall health care spending rate of growth since 1991. As hospital spending continues to grow and as reimbursement for hospital expenses has moved towards the prospective payment system, there is still increasing pressure to reduce costs. Hospitals have a major incentive to decrease reso...

Prospective payment rates based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) have been established as the basis of Medicare’s hospital reimbursement system. The DRGs are a patient classification scheme which provides a means of relating the type of patients a hospital treats (i.e., its case mix) to the costs incurred by the hospital. The design and development of the DRGs began in the late sixties at Yal...

Implementation of the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS) for hospital payment has produced major changes in the hospital industry and in the way hospital services are used by physicians and their patients. The substantial published literature that examines these changes is reviewed in this article. This literature suggests that most of the intended effects of PPS on costs and intensity o...

OBJECTIVES To determine insurance-related disparities in hospital care for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure (HF) and pneumonia. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS A total of 22 392 patients with AMI, 8056 patients with HF and 17 161 patients with pneumonia were selected from 31 tertiary hospitals in Shanxi, China, from 2014 to 2015 using the International Classification of...

Effective in 2000, Medicare's Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) sets pre-determined reimbursement rates for hospital outpatient services, replacing the prior cost-based methods of reimbursement. Using Florida outpatient discharge data, we study the effect of OPPS on hospital outpatient volume. We find that on average Medicare rate cuts either decreased or had no significant effect on...

As part of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Medicare hospitals have part of their Medicare reimbursements withheld and then redistributed to hospitals based on quality performance. The Hospital Value Based Purchasing payment reimbursement plan relies partly on ordinal rankings of hospitals to determine how money is redistributed. We analyze the quality metric distributions u...