Here’s a website for Florida blue cross with examples of how to calculate payments for the same DRG with various length of stays. Seems strange they put a lot of work into coming up with this if length of stay is completely moot as you stated.
https://www.floridablue.com/sites/floridablue.com/files/docs/Length of Stay Examples.pdf
You see, in the real world, DRG have what are called trim points. That’s the number of days that are included in the initial payment but then if the stay is longer than the trim point, a different rate applies. It could be a different calculation of % or it could simply be a Per Diem payment. Per Diem meaning per day. Funny that a concept of Per Diem would even exist if the length of stay didn’t matter at all.
You see, Hospitals whose contract was not negotiated by a retard, build in additional payments for when the stay is long or has very high billed charges. They 3 day stay and the 200 day stay might pay exact;y the same for those first 3 days, but after that, they most likely pay very differently. The 200 day stay will likely get paid a set rate Per Diem (per day) for days over the agreed upon number of days that are included in the initial DRG payment. Then some contracts even have a $ threshold where the Hospital is paid a % of charge over a certain amount.
but again, your thesis that hospital gets paid the same regardless of length of stay or billed charges is ridiculously false.
It is obvious that you don’t really know anything about this. All you know is some blurb you read somewhere or maybe a conversation you overheard in an elevator and that blurb was either a basic oversimplified example or that person also had no idea what they were talking about. This is the point where a normal person would admit they were wrong and that they were misinformed, but I’m sure you will try to carve out some other angle to claim you are correct. Let me help. Maybe you can claim that only Florida is different and every place else, Hospitals accept $20K for a stay that billed over a million dollars. Yeah, sound legit.