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It appears that patients now entering hospitals are sicker because treatments were deferred during the height of the pandemic. The national average patient length of stay was up nearly 10% between 2019 and 2021.
Sicker patients translate to increased costs, as these patients require more intensive treatments and medications, increased staff time and more supplies and equipment.
Exacerbating this challenge is the high percentage of the population over age 65. Health care spending for someone who is 65 and older is almost 3 times as much as someone who is working age. Compounding this is the high prevalence of certain costly diseases and conditions including high rates of obesity and adult diabetes.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals have faced historic volume and revenue losses, as well as skyrocketing expenses.
Financial losses were also incurred due to paused elective surgeries and procedures during COVID-19 surges.
Read the below article "If Health Care Is So Expensive, Why Are Hospitals Closing Their Doors?"
It's because during the pandemic, the federal agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid relaxed normal rules requiring around-the-clock, on-site nurses for hospitals requesting the exception. This allowed at-home hospital care programs to rapidly expand. Those pandemic-era waivers will remain in place until at least the end of 2024, although some experts anticipate policy changes allowing such programs to remain in place permanently.
Now, it seems at-home hospital care is fast becoming an option for acute care for many conditions, even for treatment of cancer!
The practice has been enabled by other recent trends as well – for instance the increase in traveling medical staff and the prevalence of portable Internet-enabled devices to connect with medical help remotely.
Such shifts could potentially reshape the future of hospital care, affecting many more patients.
What's been your experience?
Feel free to leave your comments....
If Health Care Is So Expensive, Why Are Hospitals Closing Their Doors?
Remember when Obamacare and moving to electronic health records were supposed to fix all that? — while at the same time many hospitals claim they are in dire straits?
Take Mississippi, over the last three years, hospitals in the state have lost $1.5 billion compared to pre-pandemic levels. The reason? Everything costs more—from contract labor which grew by 450 percent, to the cost of medical supplies which has risen by $82 million across the state. Drug expenses are also up 14 percent.
Some argue that hospitals would be in better shape if Medicaid was expanded. Alabama is one of eleven states that hasn’t expanded eligibility for the program since the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Getting the remaining eleven states to expand Medicaid would mean they’d be switching from one program that loses money to a different program that loses money, hopefully at a slower rate. To me that is prolonging things.
Thank goodness, Growth Management Group will be launching a new service that just might turn things around. This should be released within a few weeks and from what I hear, it will be on a contingency basis, meaning that if there are no savings, there are no fees!!
I will post this here as soon as it is available.
Tax Incentives | Expense Reduction | Retirement Plans | Corp. Financing | Smart Medical
Frequent shutdowns can fix most computer issues, but you can try a shift shutdown to close all processes and apps and clear the RAM completely.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says list prices on more than 1,200 prescription drugs rose faster than inflation between July 2021 and July 2022, rising on average 31.6 percent, according to a new report, but there is a new tool to obtain steep discounts and sometimes, even free at bit.ly/SmartMedical
If you had nothing better to do than read these newsletters each month, you know I don’t hard sell my books. I don’t soft sell them either. I distract you and sort of sneakily float them into your awareness. Then I take most of the newsletter to craft a short, humorous essay.
I had intended to do the same this month. It would have been the funniest thing I’ve ever written and you would have laughed until you cried. You might even have laughed so hard you would have ruptured a carotid artery and perished in one minute flat, which would have been sad, but it would have been a better way to go than dying from an aggressive colonization of your tongue by a hideous extraterrestrial fungus, as we’re seeing everywhere these days.
Instead of writing an amusing piece, I am inspired by you, dear readers, to write about hope. Recently, I have received a number of letters from those of you who say that my novels give you hope about life, people, and the future. Of course, the incredibly gripping storylines, breathtaking suspense, dazzling prose, brilliantly developed characters, profound themes, and clever use of the semicolon are important aspects of my novels, which you have been kind enough to note when pressed during my follow-up phone calls.
However, if I can take you seriously—which I believe I can, as none of your letters has been hilarious—you don’t find much that’s hopeful in a lot of the books and movies you turn to for relief from the vicissitudes of life. How, you ask, can I be so hopeful in a time of inflation, rising crime, epidemics, war, injustice, and horrific problems getting tickets to Taylor Swift concerts?
Well, since you have forced me to brood on the issue, I have arrived at one suggestion about how to remain hopeful, based on my own experience. I spend ten hours a day alone in my office with my imagination, watching no news and never going online. You might try being alone in a room ten hours every day, doing something you enjoy, whether it’s knitting taboggan caps or painting smiley toad faces on blank cards to mail to friends, which is what I do when the writing isn’t going well. As long as whatever you do isn’t something evil, you might develop a rich sense of hope. If your life is so busy that you can’t be alone in a room for ten hours, try twelve hours. If twelve hours isn’t possible either, try a different room. (It’s all right to have a dog with you.)
Finally, here’s what I’d say if you were here and I could give you a hug. The world is dark, but it’s also incredibly beautiful. Appreciation of beauty builds hope. I’m 77 years old, and the world is more beautiful than it was when I was six and thought I would be the first firefighter astronaut President of the United States. (I never was.) Life is full of challenges, but if it wasn’t, it would be boring; overcoming challenges is how we build hope.
And a sense of humor is vital. Even the darker moments of life are threaded through with humor when enough time has passed and you can look back with less emotion. Nine years ago, when I was in the ER, having lost half my blood overnight to a bleeding ulcer, my heart rate over 200 per minute, I was making jokes about death to the physician and nurses. If they hadn’t laughed from time to time, I would have insisted on being moved to another hospital with a more easily amused ER staff.
My most recent novel is The House at the End of the World. It sounds scary, and it is, but it’s also full of hope. It’s available in hardcover, eBook, and audio—though if you never buy it, that’s all right; you’re still aces with me. But if you want my undying love, buy it.
Warmest regards from everyone here in Koontzland,
Dean Koontz
