Office-based physicians provided an estimated $10.5 billion worth of in-kind services and charity care to the uninsured in 2013, according to an analysis of uncompensated care in the United States.
Total expenditures for care to the uninsured were projected by using two methods: One used data from the federal Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), and the other "used published secondary data from health care providers and government sources," said Teresa A. Coughlin and her associates at the Urban Institute in Washington.
The MEPS data yielded a total uncompensated expenditure of $84.9 billion for 2013, while the second analysis projected a total cost of $74.9 billion. The difference reflects the exclusion of information from some sources in the second analysis, such as drugs provided at no charge by some pharmaceutical companies, and conservative assumptions made about uncompensated care provided by publicly funded sources such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service, they said (Health Aff. 2014;33:807-14).
The $10.5 billion in care provided by office-based physicians represents 14% of the $74.9 billion from the second analysis. The largest share (59.5%, or $44.6 billion) was provided by hospitals, with the other $19.8 billion (26.4%) coming from community sources funded by the VA, IHS, local and state health departments, and automobile and home-owners insurance, Ms. Coughlin and her associates reported.
The MEPS data could not be used to see how costs of uncompensated care were divided among providers and which funding sources paid for such care, so only the second analysis estimated physicians’ share, the investigators noted.
The study was part of a project for the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
