AHA Stat Blog: Study on hospital and physician prices misses the mark

The authors of a new study on hospital and physician prices “use limited data to draw broad conclusions,” writes AHA Executive Vice President Tom Nickels in the AHA Stat blog. In addition to using data that represents just 13.5 percent of Americans with health coverage, he said the study fails to note that average total drug spending by hospitals per admission increased 18.5 percent between fiscal years 2015 and 2017; that hospital price and spending growth have slowed in recent years, with price growth just 1.7 percent and spending growth lower than all other categories of services; or that hospitals and health systems must manage a number of significant costs that do not apply to the physicians included in the study, among other shortcomings.