Inefficient or Not, Hospitals Are Overcharging

A sizable literature related to the efficiency of the U.S. hospital sector has been produced over the past 30 years. Much of this research is based on stochastic frontier analysis. This approach is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, a functional form for a hospital’s cost function must be assumed, and a limited number of forms are tractable. Second, inefficiency is measured as the expectation of a random variable with a pre-determined distribution, with no theoretical justification for the underlying assumption, that observed cost equals minimum cost plus some non-negative, random amount. Thus, the conclusion reached by most of these studies, that U.S. hospitals are inefficient, may not be foregone. Using an entirely different methodology that obviates these shortcomings, the current study suggests that whether or not hospitals are efficient, their revenues have not been increasing in proportion to the minimum cost of providing their services. This study’s estimates of the impact of input prices and technology on production costs indicate that between 2000 and 2017, hospital revenues increased at a substantially higher rate than hospital costs. This study suggests that hospitals are pricing their services well above average cost. As a result, in 2017 over $200 billion could have been transferred from patients to the hospital sector, whether due to the proclivity of hospital administrators to purchase more inputs than are necessary for production, or to subsidize activities other than patient care.