Health Care BS

The folks at the WSJ Health Blog have produced a post that can only be described as pure, unadulterated BS. Using figures from the most prosperous 1% of nonprofit hospitals, they make the following generalization:

There’s big money in health care, even for institutions that aren’t chartered to make a profit.

Here’s a chart (from the AHA) showing the “big money” that American hospitals raked in from 1991 to 2005. This is the aggregate margin for patient care (note to the folks at the Health Blog: less than zero is bad):

Total margin, including interest from investments and other items unrelated to patient care, looks a little better in the aggregate. Nonethless, 25% of U.S. hospitals are losing money even by that measure:

Among the many profoundly ignorant assertions in the post is this passage concerning the source of all this supposed swag that nonprofits are allegedly scooping up:

There are a bunch of reasons for the profit growth. Medicare reimbursements to hospitals have been climbing …

What crap! Medicare payments relative to costs have been declining for a decade, and they have been below cost since 2000. Here’s another AHA chart (less than zero is still bad):

Commenting on another post about Thomas Jefferson’s disdain for the Press, reader EEJ quotes Mark Twain as follows:

If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.

It would appear that this maxim should be extended to cover the WSJ Health Blog.