Arkansas Blog

Hell no, expensive doesn't mean better. We get less health care for our dollar than most industrialized nations.

I wouldn't be surprised if Cuba's system produces higher health at a lower cost.

Our current system does what it was designed to do: Maximize profits for the health care industry, which is more or less independent of the quality of care or patient life.

Anybody interested in the facts can study, among other resources, the 2007 edition of Hospital Statistics, published by the American Hospital Association.

It reports that in 2005 (the latest year for which full-year data are available) the hospitals of Arkansas had an aggregate profit margin of 0.71%. They incurred bad debt expenses of $566,000,000 that year and provided charity care costing $294,000,000.

Those of you who will be retiring soon need to find a physician (right now!) who will take new Medicare patients if, as scheduled, a 10% reduction in Medicare physician fees takes effect in January. The total physician fee reduction will be something like 40% over the next three years or so if Congress does not overrule the Medicare bureaucrats. Many Arkansas physicians say they simply won't treat Medicare patients when payments are less than the cost of providing services.

I hate to disappoint whatever cynics may be out there, but I am not a physician, a nurse, or a hospital executive. I make it my business, however, to be informed on matters such as this. That's why I questioned the chief executive of a large Arkansas hospital about its reported $20 million in revenue over expenses one recent year.

He proved to me, on paper, that if economic times turned severely sour, the $20 million would cover his system's payroll for only four pay periods. Otherwise, the excess would be reinvested in new or improved equipment and technology as required by the IRS of not-for-profit facilities like his.

Missing from the NY Times article is how often a region gets it's medical billings audited. Makes a huge difference.

Wouldn't overhead vary widely from state to state? The cost of skilled labor and the cost of the property itself would be significantly different in, say, Southern California from that in Arkansas. Like schoolteachers, nurses and allied health professionals make much less in rural areas than urban areas, particularly costly ones like CA.

It was interesting to look at the numbers of people on Medicare and where they are. Notice that in Southern California and areas around Denver there are far fewer enrollees (dark green)than there are in other areas? Must be a lot of either young people and/or wealthy people in those places.

Most of Arkansas has above the national average.

It also looks like there is a possibility that the places that have a higher percentage of whites may have more enrollees also. I could be wrong on that, though.