One thought on “Hospitals: Same Surgery, Widely Different Rates

  1. Under certain conditions, hospitals can have their “wage area” reclassified. Such is the case with Dempsey, thanks to its labor expenses. Its Disproportionate Share Hospital Patient Percent of 0.32312 is second only to Yale New Haven’s of 0.33474. The work done by Dartmouth’s Jonathan Skinner and his colleagues finds that, even after controlling for Medicare’s formulaic adjustments, more expensive hospitals cost Medicare more—because of such patterns-of-practice factors as more MRI use, more visits by physicians, etc.