NYS Health Accountability Foundation

There’s a New York state organization that calls itself the New York State Health Accountability Foundation. What they do is rank services provided by hospitals throughout the state and publish the statistics online for all to see.

This isn’t a bad idea, because I believe that if certain facilities are providing bad services, or at least the physicians they contract with provide bad services, we all should know about them. I often hear that one hospital is good at this, while another is good at that, and now this group has put together some pretty interesting statistics.

However, there are some statistics that have to be looked at harder than others, some which the regular consumer might not understand. I found out about this group through a news story that spoke on the different prices hospitals throughout central New York charge for similar services. The misconception by most consumers is that hospitals work just like department stores. Well, in a small way they do. If a department store is in a mall, as opposed to a standalone building, they may have to price their items based on how much rent they’re paying and where they’re located.

Hospitals are no different when it comes to pricing. Hospitals have to start with the basic premise of making sure their charges are higher than what they might be paid from insurance companies such as Medicare and Medicaid. Next, hospitals have to make sure their charges are at least on par with their costs, and this is where hospitals aren’t the same. The costs are drastically different between a hospital with 500 beds versus a hospital with 100 beds. Larger hospitals have more employees; it costs more to regulate the temperature; they usually offer more services, and all that equipment costs money; the more services, the more regulations, the more it costs; the agreements with physicians to provide services costs more, and there are more physicians to deal with. On and on and on.

What I’ve had to learn is how the costs of a facility in a certain area, based on size and services offered, can drastically change your perspective on hospital pricing. I remember a conversation with a director at a hospital in Philadelphia 3 years ago, where I was saying that I’d never seen a hospital bill higher than $500,000, and she stated that her facility regularly had inpatient bills over $1 million dollars. There’s a big difference in costs between Syracuse and Pittsburgh, just as there are between Syracuse and Fulton, NY.

So, take some of the statistics you might find on this page with an open mind. In healthcare, you’re not always comparing apples to apples.