Inpatient hospital prices grow sharply in county

Inpatient hospital costs grew at a faster rate from 2008 to 2010 in lower Fairfield County than in nearly any other metropolitan area of the U.S., according to a recent report.

Hospital prices per admission are estimated to have risen 8.2 percent to $15,236 in 2010 from $13,016 in 2008 nationwide, according to the March report, “Trends in Inpatient Hospital Prices,” in the American Journal of Managed Care.

Inpatient costs grew at a faster annual rate ”” 10.8 percent ”” in the Bridgeport-Norwalk-Stamford labor market, which had the fifth-highest average annual inpatient price growth rate of all the metropolitan regions included in the data that were examined.

The data used by authors Jeff Lemieux and Teresa Mulligan were obtained from the MarketScan research databases compiled by Truven Health Analytics Inc., formerly known as Thomson Reuters Healthcare, and cover about 30 percent of the U.S. under-65 population with private health insurance.

Both Lemieux and Mulligan are researchers at America”™s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a national trade association for health plans.

The authors open by stating their interest in getting a better picture of variations in the cost of individual hospital services.

“Despite the keen interest in U.S. health care costs, there is surprisingly little detailed public information available on one of its key components: transaction prices paid by commercial insurers for inpatient hospital care,” the report states.

“Our goals were to track price levels and changes in the most current period, and to provide detailed benchmark information for use by managed care plans and hospitals, and to facilitate further study on reasons for changes and variations in hospital prices.”

After adjusting for changes in the nature and cost of certain treatments due to technological advances and other factors, the report found that prices per admission increased by between 6.2 and 6.8 percent a year from 2008 to 2010.

Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of AHIP, said there needs to be a greater understanding around what drives the cost of health care upward in order for efforts aimed at making health care more affordable to succeed.

“The price of health care services is the major driver of overall health care cost growth,” Ignagni said in a statement following the journal article”™s release. “To make health care coverage more affordable for consumers and employers, there needs to be a much greater focus on the underlying cost of medical care.”

The report draws on 2008 data that includes 49 million people who are under the age of 65 and who were enrolled in commercial group health insurance and on 2010 data that includes about 45 million such individuals.

The 2008 data set includes 2.2 million enrollees with at least one hospitalization, while the 2010 data set includes 1.9 million enrollees with at least one hospitalization.

The average age of the hospitalized patients, including infants, was approximately 36 years, with the average length of stay about four days.

Areas where the authors observed the highest annual cost growth included spinal fusion, which increased an average of 15.2 percent a year from 2008 to 2010, and bronchitis and asthma treatment, which increased an average of 10.3 percent.

The average cost of treatments for simple pneumonia and inflammation of the chest and lungs, for stomach and digestive system disorders, for nutritional and metabolic disorders, and for circulatory disorders each increased by more than 9 percent annually from 2008 to 2010.

While Connecticut didn”™t crack the list of the top 10 states with the highest average annual inpatient cost growth, the Bridgeport-Norwalk-Stamford region ranked 5th among metropolitan areas with average annual inpatient cost growth of 10.8 percent.

The region was closely followed by the New York City-White Plains, N.Y.-Wayne, N.J. region, where costs averaged annual growth of 10.7 percent.

An AHIP spokeswoman said the authors did not seek to explore why the cost increases varied from procedure to procedure and region to region, only to initiate a discussion on the topic of inpatient costs.