There is substantial waste in U.S. healthcare, but little consensus on how to identify or combat it.
New research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business identifies one specific source of waste: long-term care hospitals.
In the working paper, “Long Term Care Hospitals: A Case Study in Waste,” Chicago Booth Professor Neale Mahoney, Stanford University’s Liran Einav and MIT’s Amy Finkelstein, find that most patients in long-term care hospitals would receive similar or better care at a skilled nursing facility at a lower cost.
The paper, released as a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, concludes that Medicare could save about $4.6 billion a year—with no harm to patients—by simply eliminating the concept of long-term care hospitals as an institution with its own reimbursement schedule, and reimbursing the institutions as skilled nursing facilities instead.
Read more of the original article from MedicalXpress
