LCMC Fleecing Patients
Health care in Louisiana is expensive compared to the rest of the country. The state is consistently listed near the top of the Forbes’ rankings of the most expensive states for health care1, and has the second highest worker paid premiums for family health coverage in the county.2
A major factor driving up health costs in Louisiana are the extremely high prices charged by hospitals like LCMC Health.
According to data released by Medicare, LCMC’s overall charge- to-cost ratio is 526%. In other words — if a patient at an LCMC hospital receives health services costing $100 to provide, LCMC will charge that patient $526!
While other area hospitals are also charging far beyond their costs, LCMC is among the most extreme.
- LCMC Health has the highest charges relative to costs of any health system in
the area. - LCMC’s charge-to-cost ratio is significantly higher than the statewide average.
- LCMC operates the hospital with the highest charges relative to costs in the
New Orleans metropolitan area.
Source: 2023 Medicare cost reports
LCMC’s absurdly high charges are driving up their record profits (more than $1 billion in total since 2010), while contributing directly to unaffordable health care costs, threatening individuals and families with medical debt and bankruptcy.
In order to pay for the high health costs fueling LCMC’s billion dollar profits, Louisiana residents have taken on $1.9 billion in medical debt, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And this mountain of debt is proving difficult to pay off – the CFPB reports that Louisiana has the third highest share in the nation of individuals who have medical debt in collections on their credit file.3 It is unacceptable that so many Louisiana residents are facing financial ruin just to get the healthcare they need.
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More details about charge-to-cost ratios (CCRs):
While the charge-to-cost ratios do not tell us what hospitals are being reimbursed for their services, the data shows that higher CCRs are strongly associated with higher hospital profits. Furthermore, the CCRs are derived from hospitals’ chargemaster price lists, which are the starting point for the reimbursement negotiations between hospitals and insurance companies, and thus are a factor in pushing reimbursement rates higher.
Additionally, some patients do get stuck with the chargemaster prices or something close to them, especially uninsured patients, out-of-network patients, workers comp insurers, and auto insurers.4
1. Louisiana ranked 10th in 2024 and ranked 2nd in 2020.
2. Average Annual Family Premium per Enrolled Employee For Employer-Based Health Insurance, 2023. Kaiser Family Foundation.
3. Medical Debt Burden in the United States. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, February 2022.
4. Fleecing Patients: Hospitals Charge Patients More Than Four Times the Cost of Care