Uninsured patients in California are paying net prices for hospital treatment that are as high as and higher than prices paid by Medicare, according to a new study by researchers at RAND and the University of Southern California (USC) published Feb. 5 on the Health Affairs web site. The study comes on the heels of a crucial vote in a state Senate committee against a comprehensive plan to cover uninsured people in the nation’s most populous state.
Using data collected from 2001 through 2005 by the California government, the researchers found that, on average, hospitals in that state collect a higher percentage of their list prices--known as “charges”--from uninsured patients than from those covered by Medicare. Over the 2001-02 period, hospitals collected 18 percent more of their charges from uninsured patients than from Medicare patients; by the 2004-05 period, that difference had risen slightly to 20 percent of charges. The median uninsured patient--the patient midway between the patient who paid the highest percentage of charges and the patient who paid the smallest percentage--paid a portion of hospital charges that was 8 percent higher than Medicare paid in 2001-02 and 1 percent lower than Medicare paid in 2004-05. Read the abstract.
