From the Literature

The National Hospital Bill: The Most Expensive Conditions by Payer, 2006
By Roxanne M. Andrews, PhD
September 2008


The National Hospital Bill: The Most Expensive Conditions by Payer is a report prepared by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The report is useful as a benchmark to policymakers concerned with the rising costs of hospitalizations passed on to government, insurers, and consumers.

Issued as one of the Agency's Statistical Briefs, the reports track the growing burden of costs for inpatient hospitalizations in the United States by all payers. Highlighted in each report are the Top 20 Most Expensive Conditions taken from the HCUP Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), a sample survey representative of all aggregate U.S. community hospitals. Included is the number of hospital admissions, the diagnosis based upon ICD-9-CM coding, the cost of procedures, how many billions were billed to Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and the uninsured. The statistics were generated from HCUPnet, a free, online query system that provides users with immediate access to largest set of publicly available, all-payer national, regional, and state-level hospital care databases from HCUP. Statistical reports include tables and charts.

This report does not include data for hospital outpatient visits, emergency care visits not resulting in admission, or fees for physician services. Separate data sets exist for emergency department visits and outpatient visits.


Source: Statistical Brief #59