Components of Cost Increases for Inpatient Hospital Procedures, 1997–2009

Excerpt

Inpatient hospital costs represent the largest component of health care expenditures in the United States. Between 1997 and 2009, aggregate inflation-adjusted costs for inpatient community hospital stays grew by 3.9 percent annually, driven mostly by change in the intensity of services (cost per stay). Intensity of services includes the increased use of procedures or more complex procedures during a hospital stay.

This Statistical Brief presents recent data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). It also expands prior analyses by examining the growth in costs from 1997–2009 associated with the 20 most common inpatient procedures (among all hospital stays) for the elderly (age 65 and older) and nonelderly (younger than age 65) populations. All differences between estimates provided in the text are statistically significant at the 0.005 level or lower. Costs for 1997 were inflation-adjusted to 2009 dollars.