The National Academy of State Health Policy (NASHP) has released the Hospital Cost Tool described at the Annual Meeting. https://www.nashp.org/hospital-cost-tool/ To better understand and address hospital costs, NASHP in collaboration with Rice University Baker Institute for Public Policy and Mathemetica Policy Research, with support from Arnold Ventures, has launched the interactive Hospital Cost Tool.
- The downloadable tool provides critical data to inform cost-containment discussions with hospitals on a range of measures to offer insights on hospital profitability and break-even points that have been calculated using hospitals’ annual Medicare Cost Reports (MCR).
- The dataset includes over 4,600 hospitals nationwide with annual data from 2011 through 2019.
- The tool can help purchasers and regulators assess hospitals’ costs, their public and commercial payer mix, and their cost recovery from Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial payers.
- The tool also calculates the amount commercial payers would need to pay to cover their patients’ hospital costs and any balance from government program payments, unallocated MCR operating costs, disallowed MCR costs, and hospital’s other income/other expenses.
- Understanding the proportion of hospital revenue from different payers along with the percentage of patients covered by those payers provides a more complete picture of how the payer mix contributes to a hospital’s revenue.
- Data from 2020 will be added later this year.
We will be sending additional information to our employer members this week on how best to navigate the tool and what the data means. Please reach out to Karen van Caulil for more information karen@flhealthvalue.org
