Why 1 in 3 US Hospitals Are On Life Support
April 20, 2012 Leave a comment
“The hospital institution is in the midst of massive and disruptive change.” ~ KevinMD.com
Last year the American Hospital Association had 5,754 registered hospital members, which managed 36,915,331 admissions with their 942,000 hospital beds.
More than $750 billion was spent in these hospitals last year, and many are large figure largely in their local economies, representing one of the largest employers and economic drivers of their community. But the US hospital system is undergoing a seismic shift – one that will result in a significant contraction, according to MedPage Today’s Dr. Kevin Pho.
Why 1 in 3 hospitals will close in the next 8 years
Reason #1. Health care costs are too high. The average employee costs the average employers $12,000 annually in health care benefits – a figure that continues to climb at a rate of 10% annually. U.S. businesses cannot hope to be competitive in the global marketplace and carry this ever-increasing burden. Federal and state government budgets are facing bankruptcy from the costs of Medicare and Medicaid health care entitlement programs. Something’s got to give, and hospital costs are generally regarded as the most expensive part of the delivery system for health care in America.
Reason #2. Hospitals are the third – as in, top 3 – leading causes of death in the US. Every year 34,000 people die on the highways – but the Journal of the American Medical Association reports more than 3 times that many die of medical error in hospitals. Put another way: hospitals cause 100,000 deaths (mostly from hospital-acquired infections) every year.
That’s a lot of people. That’s 200 747 airplanes’s worth of people crashing every year. We don’t tolerate that sort of risk in our airline industry – much less charge people a premium for it. We will not be able to contiue tolerating it in our health care system.
Your Odds of Dying From Hospital-Acquired Infection
If you become a patient, your odds of dying at the hospital, because of the hospital: 1 out of every 370. It would take one 747 crashing every day for 200 consecutive days in the U.S. to equal this number of preventable deaths. But in the current US healthcare system, American patients have no way of knowing which hospitals are the most dangerous. We must made the de facto choice of taking uninformed chances, with our lives at stake.
Reason #3: Hospital customer care is nonexistent, with the average American hospital emergency room wait exceeding two hours. In fact, it it nearer 4 hours. Do you know any other business where Americans tolerate this low level of value and service?
Reason #4: Health care reform means that the technologies that have resulted in efficiencies and lower costs in other industries will will make connectivity and the efficiency and cost savings that come with it the new normal in health care deliver. In just a few years, patients will be able to shop and compare hospitals just as they do cars, checking infection rates, surgical outcomes, and other important metrics, not the least of which is price. As David Houle and Jonathan Fleece point out, it is inevitable that when we are able to do this, hospitals will be forced to become more competitive on quality, service, and cost…or die:
“What hospitals are about to enter is the open competitive market. We know what happens in this environment. There are winners and losers…fully 30% of hospitals now in existence in the U.S. will not cross the 2020 finish line as winners.”
The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki agrees, this week publishing Club Med on his Financial Page: “If domestic hospitals actually had to compete with international hospitals the way American car companies have to compete with Toyota and Honda, they might be forced to become more efficient.” Surowiecki predicts that Americans will look abroad to reduce spiraling health care costs, profiling international hospitals that have made the practice of medical tourism famous.
Read the full article here: Why one-third of hospitals will close by 2020.
Most of our games were Saturday afternoon, but sometimes there was an exciting night game, under the lights. I remember one game, a girl on the team, Karen, was sitting next to me bouncing around with all the excess energy of a typical 10-year-old, enhanced by the nerviness of the unfamiliar lights arcing up above us, the night pressing up against the illuminated edge of the outfield.
