Hospital profit planning under Medicare reimbursement

The federal Medicare regulations reimburse hospitals on a pro rata share of the hospital's cost. Hence, to meet its financial requirements, a hospital is forced to shift more of the financial burdens onto its private patients. This procedure has contributed to double digit inflation in hospital prices and to proposed federal regulation to control the rate of increase in hospital revenues. In this regulatory environment, we develop nonlinear programming pricing and cost allocation models to aid hospital administrators in meeting their profit maximizing and profit satisfying goals. The model enables administrators to explore tactical issues such as: (i) studying the relationship between a voluntary or legislated cap on a hospital's total revenues and the hospital's profitability, (ii) identifying those departments within the hospital that are the most attractive candidates for cost reduction or cost containment efforts, and (iii) isolating those services that should be singled out by the hospital manager for renegotiation of the prospective or "customary and reasonable" cap. Finally the modeling approach is helpful in explaining the departmental cross subsidies observed in practice, and can be of aid to federal administrators in assessing the impacts of proposed changes in the Medicare reimbursement formula.