The Growing Difference Between Public And Private Payment Rates For Inpatient Hospital Care

The authors appreciate the helpful comments of Didem Bernard, Joel Cohen, Steven Cohen, Steven Hill, Paul Jacobs, Brigid Russell, Herbert Wong, and Samuel Zuvekas of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ); Jeffrey Stensland of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC); Benedic Ippolito of the American Enterprise Institute; and the editors and referees at Health Affairs . William Marder and his staff at Truven Health Analytics assisted the authors by providing special MarketScan tabulations for benchmarking purposes. Stensland also provided assistance with technical details regarding MedPAC’s estimates. Caroline Steinberg of the American Hospital Association (AHA) provided the authors with unpublished estimates from the AHA Annual Survey of Hospitals. Any remaining errors are those of the authors. The authors acknowledge the voluntary participation of the state partner organizations and their provision of databases used in the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) National Inpatient Sample in 2012 and the Nationwide Inpatient Sample in 2000–11. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors, and no official endorsement by the Department of Health and Human Services, AHRQ, or the RAND Corporation is intended or should be inferred.