When the pandemic began in 2020, providing care to hospitalized COVID-19 patients cost hospitals around $10,394 per patient. Since then, the price to provide the same inpatient care climbed by 26% to $13,072 in just two years, according to the research published Jan. 3 in JAMA.
Even as more became known about the virus between March 2020 and March 2022 — the time frame used for the study's analysis — costs continued to rise, according to the authors Kandice Kapinos, PhD, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation; Richard Peters Jr., MD of the Department of Population Health at the University of Texas at Austin's Dell Medical School; and Robert Murphy, MD of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston's School of Biomedical Informatics.
"During the largest pandemic in more than 100 years in the U.S. … costs to provide inpatient care increased even as care practices changed, vaccination rates increased and the variants of concern evolved," the authors wrote.
For the study, the authors analyzed data from 1.3 million inpatient cases with COVID-19 listed as a primary or secondary diagnosis between March 1, 2020, to March 31, 2022, from 841 different hospitals across the nation.
The cost increases for COVID-19 patients, they found, rose at a rate of five times more than medical inflation overall.
Driving the change? In part, it has been patients who required a treatment known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — or ECMO — which uses a pump to move blood outside the body through an artificial lung and heart machine, which removes carbon dioxide and sends fully oxygenated blood back into the body. Stays that required this element of care had an average per-patient price tag of $36,484.
Use of the ECMO technique increased over time as clinical guidelines and practices around COVID-19 also evolved.
Rising costs of drugs, labor, and supplies have also played a role in driving up the costs of COVID care, the authors point out.
"Hospitals' cost of prescription drug treatments used to treat COVID-19 has increased over time as emergency use authorizations and U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals were granted, manufacturers’ donated doses were depleted, and the federal government’s program of purchasing and distributing therapeutics waned," they wrote.