Driving Health Care Premiums: Cost-Shifting in New Hampshire

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Brief Description

In an environment in which the public payers – which account for almost 50 percent of health care expenditures – pay less than the costs of services and some of the uninsured are provided services through hospital-based charitable care, the hospital industry has to find ways to support patient care services.  One way of financing these deficits has been through allocation of unrecovered costs of one patient population to above-cost revenue collected from other patient populations – largely the privately insured.   This phenomenon is called ‘cost-shifting.’   Hospitals also generate positive operating margins. Operating margins are the share of revenues for patient care services that exceed expenses for providing that care.