Pittsburgh hospitals' care costs are highest in country
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Pittsburgh spends more on hospital care per person than any other major U.S. city, including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. This region is also near the top in the number of hospital admissions for chronic conditions that should be managed without being hospitalized, such as diabetes or asthma.
That's what local consultant Harold D. Miller found after analyzing price-adjusted Medicare data collected by the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care (http://www.dartmouthatlas.org/).
The stark numbers don't reveal why we spend more and why we don't manage chronic conditions better.
But they do suggest an interesting dichotomy about medical care in Pittsburgh: We don't do well handling the low-end, manageable and preventable health problems and, perhaps as a result, we may end up paying more for the high-end conditions. But that's not all.
"A number of things contribute to it," said Mr. Miller, executive director of Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a national health care policy organization. Mr. Miller, who is also president of the Future Strategies LLC management and policy consulting firm Downtown, writes a monthly column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Pittsburgh seems to be sicker than most cities, he said, with more obesity, more diabetes, more chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and other chronic conditions. It could be, however, that those conditions are simply recognized more often here.
Yet the data are stark -- Medicare spends about $5,500 in hospital care per beneficiary in Pittsburgh, while places such as Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Seattle are all under $4,000. And only Nashville has a higher rate of hospitalizations that might have been prevented with better-managed care.
First Published February 12, 2012 12:00 am
