Here’s two things which will likely increase facility costs.

Becker’s reported last week that so far this year hospital and health system margins (with some very notable exceptions) are pretty crappy – down almost 12 percent month over month in February, and a whopping 42% below February 2020 (jsut before COVID).

My bet is significantly higher staffing costs are a major contributor; the giant Henry Ford system said labor costs were up 8% in February over the same month in 2021; Providence’s increase was even higher at 10%.

Couple that with a steep drop-off in health insurance coverage as COVID-related medicaid coverage ends, and you can expect facility costs to jump.

That’s because we’re going to see a lot more uninsureds seeking care at hospitals.

Medicaid is likely the single largest payer today, with about one out of every four of us covered by Medicaid.

The problem will be especially acute in states that have not expanded Medicaid – if your members/insureds/injured workers are in the orange states, you’ve already been paying a hidden tax to help pay for uninsured care delivered by hospitals.

Since states can pretty much determine who gets Medicaid, the problem is even worse in places like Mississippi that have long restricted Medicaid coverage to a very thin slice of the poor.

If you make more than 27% of the federal poverty level, you’re too rich to get Medicaid in Mississippi – which is both the poorest and sickest state in the nation.  (kudos to Louise Norris for her intel on the issue)

What does this mean for you?

Success favors the prepared. If you think you’ve got an answer to this you’re likely wrong. 

Is Not Good.

that’s the primary takeaway from Bogdan Savych PhD’s presentation at WCRI’s annual conference– and a lot of other work I’ve done on the topic.

Consolidation eliminates competition – although I’d posit there’s little true competition in health care services. [I’ve written a LOT about  consolidation and the impact thereof]

There’s solid evidence that consolidation actually leads to increased prices and some research indicating it leads to decreased quality.

So how has healthcare evolved – well, primary care docs shifted from mostly solo practice to employment by health systems or group practices. Note this data is from 2018; consolidation has accelerated since then.

Of course, like everything else in healthcare, it’s local…orthopedic practices in Wisconsin are much more likely to be owned by health systems than those in Delaware.

Dr Savych’s research hit on a critical issue – exactly how many workers’ comp patients do primary care docs see? – the answer is most see almost none – with just one out of every ten physicians seeing more than 10 WC patients per year. Of course orthos see more – but still not many; only about a third see more than 10 claimants per year.

There are a whole host of issues with this which we’ll get into in a future post. For now, the net is researchers have to identify the specific physician responsible for the care of and outcomes for specific patients – which is fiendishly difficult especially when that physician moves from a group practice to employment by a health system. Provider identification is the main challenge – but by no means the only one.

Case mix adjusting – the art of comparing patients with similar diagnoses (often primary, secondary, and tertiary) over time – is as or almost as hard to get consistently right.

All that said, Dr Savych noted that cost increases are due more to a shift in the volume and type of procedures than higher prices for individual services.

The initial takeaway (there’s a LOT more research and analysis to do) is vertical integration (physician practices absorbed but health systems) leads to docs providing more expensive services.

What does this mean for you?

Consolidation raises work comp medical costs.

The best way to think about this is on a state-specific basis; understand where there’s more consolidation and watch the type of services delivered to your patients like a hawk.

The prices private insurers have paid to hospitals and physicians have increased much faster than prices paid by Medicare and Medicaid.

And it’s not because providers are cost-shifting.

Those are the main takeaways from a just-released CBO report; here’s what CBO said (emphasis added):

• commercial insurers pay much higher prices for hospitals’ and physicians’ services than Medicare FFS does.
• In addition, the prices that commercial insurers pay hospitals are much higher than hospitals’ costs.
• Paying higher prices to providers can have several effects.
  • First, it can increase insurers’ spending on claims, which may lead to higher premiums, greater cost-sharing requirements for patients...
  • Second, it can increase the federal government’s subsidies for health care .
  • And third, it can slow the growth of wages.
• The share of providers’ patients who are covered by Medicare and Medicaid is not related to higher prices paid by commercial insurers. That finding suggests that providers do not raise the prices they negotiate with commercial insurers to offset lower prices paid by government programs (a concept known as cost shifting).

Ok, that said, these are findings based on national data…things are different market to market.

I’d note that price increases in workers’ comp correlates with states’ Medicaid expansion. That is, price inflation is generally much higher in states that did NOT expand medicaid.

More on that here.

What does that mean for you?

Private insurers aren’t doing their job very well.