Interestingly, I just finished a project on developing a new reimbursement system for Philippine hospitals for my client (which is why I know a lot about their practices), and I have some statistics on average hospital charges per day from my client's claims for all countries in the world where we had beneficiaries admitted.

These are the average charges PER DAY (all inclusive except for the doctor's professional fees) for an inpatient hospitalization in European countries where we had at least 10 claims filed over a year. (I won't list those with fewer as they are too unreliable to even show). These are from highest cost to lowest--in parenthese after the country is the number of claims that avg. charge per day was calculated from:

Iceland (11) $1508
UK (441) $1213
Austria (24) $964
France (21) $817
Netherlands(97) $777
Greece (100) $768
Italy (536) $680
Portugal (51) $630
Turkey (103) $620
Belgium (370) $464
Germany (11809) $400

So, the UK is actually fairly expensive within Europe from this sample (Switzerland was high, also, but I didn't have 10 claims). Now, this is an avg. charge per day and doesn't take into account how complex the illness or treatment is, but it's an idea. These are not just emergency admissions, although some are, as a lot of these benes are expats living abroad long-term or for at least several months. The population is only those under age 65, but includes men, women and children (probably more adults than children in this group).

So, you can see that this is very reasonable compared to the US -- where the idea of a total hospital bill of only $400-$1500 per day (accommodation, tests, drugs, OR, etc. and treatment) would be quite unusual.

(I didn't show it because it's not Europe but Thailand is really cheap at only $292 a day; Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are the most expensive). These stats are dollars from mid-2002 to mid-2003 period.

okay, FYI, I just calculated the comparison to our US claims out of curiosity. (I was mistaken, the foreign claims do include some retiree folks over 65, but not that many.) All of these were regular, acute-care hospitals, also, not specialty or psychiatric, etc.

The average hospital inpatient total charge per day for all foreign countries' claims (about 25K claims from all over the world) was $612.

The average hospital charge per day in the US for our beneficiaries was $4159.