Profile of Insurance Coverage in a National Inpatient Sample

Sheree M. Schrager^1, , Christine Do¹, Ian W. Holloway², Eric M. Cheng^{3, 4} and Alex Y. Chen⁵

¹Division of Adolescent Medicine, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

²Department of Social Welfare, Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

³Department of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, USA

⁴Department of Neurology, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los Angeles, USA

⁵Community, Health Outcomes, and Intervention Research Program, The Saban Research Institute, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

Cite this paper

Sheree M. Schrager, Christine Do, Ian W. Holloway, Eric M. Cheng and Alex Y. Chen. Profile of Insurance Coverage in a National Inpatient Sample. American Journal of Public Health Research. 2013; 1(1):27-31. doi: 10.12691/AJPHR-1-1-4

Abstract

To identify the hospitals most strongly impacted by health insurance trends, this study investigated the relationships between hospital characteristics and patterns of insurance coverage in a national inpatient sample. Data from the 2007 Nationwide Inpatient Sample of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project were used to examine hospital characteristics, aggregated patient characteristics, and payer mix (defined as rates of Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and uninsured). Medicare was expected to cover nearly half of all inpatient admissions; however, hospitals showed a wide range of percentages for all payers, and some facilities reported up to 61.5% of visits from uninsured patients. Significant multivariate differences in insurance coverage resulted from bed size, location, region, and patient age, gender, racial, and socioeconomic distributions. Results suggest that reimbursement policy changes may disproportionally impact certain hospitals based on their characteristics and/or patient distribution and may be particularly informative in the current era of potential system-wide reform.

Keywords

Insurance Coverage, Hospital Characteristics, Inpatient, Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, Payer Mix

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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