{"id":4810,"date":"2012-09-20T20:41:33","date_gmt":"2012-09-21T02:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4810"},"modified":"2012-09-20T20:41:33","modified_gmt":"2012-09-21T02:41:33","slug":"missing-link-in-medical-pricing-cost-accounting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4810","title":{"rendered":"Missing link in medical pricing: cost accounting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/johntorinus.com\/blog\/transparency-on-prices-quality\/missing-link-in-medical-pricing-cost-accounting\/\">John Torinus<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Eric Bricker, a former primary care doctor, a former financial analyst for hospitals, and now chief medical officer for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.compassphs.com\/\">Compass<\/a>, a patient advocacy firm, conceded that big hospital systems use a variety of pricing strategies, but they are not based on costs.<\/p>\n<p>In most industries, there is a close connection between costs and prices. But that takes an accurate assessment of costs, which is accomplished through an old discipline called cost accounting.<\/p>\n<p>We payers are told by hospital executives that medical services are \u201ctoo complicated\u201d to analyze for costing purposes.<\/p>\n<p>In a word: nonsense.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Torinus: Eric Bricker, a former primary care doctor, a former financial analyst for hospitals, and now chief medical officer for Compass, a patient advocacy firm, conceded that big hospital systems use a variety of pricing strategies, but they are not based on costs. In most industries, there is a close connection between costs and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4810"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}