WASHINGTON – The total cost for children’s hospital stays in 2009 was $33.6 billion, or about 9 percent of overall hospital costs, according to a new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
mso-fareast-language:JA">The data comes from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) on hospital stays for children in 2009 with comparative information from earlier years. Sponsored by AHRQ, HCUP includes the largest all-payer encounter-level collection of longitudinal healthcare data (inpatient, ambulatory surgery and emergency department) in the United States.
AHRQ researchers performed descriptive analyses on the HCUP Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), which is created every three years. The KID is the only database specifically developed to study hospitalizations of children.
In 2009, 45 percent of all children’s stays were billed to private insurance and 47 percent were billed to Medicaid. This is a shift from 2000 when 55 percent of stays were billed to private insurance and only 37 percent were billed to Medicaid.
The database revealed that Medicaid’s share of aggregate hospital costs for children increased from 40 percent in 2000 ($10.5 billion, inflation-adjusted) to 49 percent in 2009 ($16.4 billion). During this same time period, the share covered by private insurers fell from 52 percent to 44 percent.
There were 6.4 million hospital stays for children 17 years and younger in 2009—nearly 17 percent of all hospital stays. About three-quarters of these pediatric hospital stays were for infants under the age of one year. Compared with all hospitalizations, stays for children were on average shorter (3.8 days) and less expensive—about half the average cost for stays overall.
The vast majority of children (94.1 percent) experienced routine discharge in 2009 compared to 72.2 percent of hospital discharges in general. Children experienced fewer transfers to other acute care hospitals or other institutions, fewer discharges to home healthcare and fewer discharges against medical advice.
Total hospital charges noted in the report were converted to costs using HCUP Cost-to-Charge Ratios based on CMS hospital accounting reports. According to AHRQ, costs tend to reflect the actual costs of production, while charges represent what the hospital billed for the case.
For more on reimbursement, see bit.ly/hfn-reimbursement.