If you knew the profit margins in hospitals, you’d be shocked.
Their services are governed by DRGs (diagnotic related groups), and both the feds and private insurers TELL HOSPITALS what they will pay. Hospitals have reacted by cutting every single thing they can. Maternity stays are often same day release, certainly the next morning. My kids were five and three day stays years ago. It used to be a week or more before that.
At one time a hospital I worked at was losing money on every maternity case. They kept doing them to remain viable for other cases where they could make money.
Try getting admitted to an HCA hospital. Talk about being skinned alive. They’ll send everybody but the janitor to talk to you, and bill you for it.
Three days to a week for an uncomplicated, plain vanilla birth? I don’t know anyone who did that-I went home the same day I had my cub-so did all the other moms who were in my Lamaze group-that was over 45 years ago, and paid for by the US military. My mom went home same day she had me-military again-but at a country hospital in W. Texas. Most women out here now use a nurse practitioner/midwife and either do the deed at home or go to the nearest birthing center-about 30 miles away-and it is like drive-thru surgery-in and out. But this is out in the country, so maybe that is why it is different.
I know people who have had a shrieking temper tantrum when they saw the Bulls*** their insurance-medicaid, Tricare/Tricare for life supplemental, Obamacare, whatever it was-had been billed for-everything from double billing to visits/consults with specialists that never happened. There is something wrong with all this, all right-and it would stop if government would get out of healthcare and leave it to the market to sort out...
If they’re hiring, it’s probably low level employees to try to shift care away from more highly compensated providers. Med technicians instead of LPNs, LPNs instead of RNs, PAs instead of doctors, etc.
Or coders and such to deal with reimbursement.
Or, as the article mentions, home healthcare to try to keep people out of the hospital.
“At one time a hospital I worked at was losing money on every maternity case. They kept doing them to remain viable for other cases where they could make money.”
That’s called a “lost leader”.