This Statistical Brief presents data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) on uninsured hospital stays in 2008. In the NIS, uninsured hospitalizations include those for which the patient was billed directly as well as those for which the hospital did not charge the patient or insurer (referred to as “no charge”). Note that although all such stays are uninsured, not all of them are uncompensated, as patients charged directly by the hospital may pay the bill in part or total.
In this Statistical Brief, characteristics of uninsured hospitalizations, such as utilization, cost, patient populations, and geographic locations are compared with the characteristics of insured hospital stays, that is, stays covered by Medicare, Medicaid, private health insurance and government programs such as Workers’ Compensation, TRICARE/CHAMPUS, CHAMPVA, and Title V. Changes in utilization by diagnosis and by procedure are compared in five year increments from 1998. All differences between estimates noted in the text are statistically significant at the 0.05 level or better.