Are you sure ? Because my insurance only pays the semi-private room rate unless a private room is medically necessary.
I remember in the 80s reading that hospitals had a way of constructing rooms that for all practical purposes were private, but there was some loophole that allowed them to be categorized as shared, which ensured that insurance would pay for the room. (Sorry I can’t find a cite right now.)
What role were you in and what era was this? Because I am 100% sure that in my father’s case in 2004 his insurance coverage only allowed for a ward during recovery from surgery. There was not even a mechanism for us (his well off children) to even find out how you could pay more and get a semi-private or private room. The hospital got a pre-authorization and that determined what was arranged. He has profound hearing loss and does not sign, so I was very involved in advocating for him.
It’s pretty depressing to see how the costs in 2004 are a joke compared to what they are now. While general inflation over the last 20 years has been about 70%, hospital stays seem to be 3-4 TIMES as expensive.
The Royal Victoria Hospital was the McGill teaching hospital and totally obsolete. They built a replacement in a different location that opened 10 years ago and has only private rooms. I read the reasons behind this decision and they made sense although I don’t recall them.
In 2005, I broke the tibia and needed to spend 4 nights in hospital to let the swelling go down before they put in a metal plate. My first night was in a bed in the hallway of the emergency room and then I was put in a 4 patient room. It was hell. The woman next to me was in pain and clearly dying. The guy diagonal to me had been knifed and had a collapsed lung and I never did find out about the guy across from me. There was no TV and my wife brought me a lot of books.
Well in 2003 the difference between what you describe as “hell” and a private room was $4000 for three days in the US hospital my father was in after surgery to remove a large part of his transverse colon. Now it’s probably tens of thousands. Except no one will tell you in advance what the cost will be for any service not covered by your insurance pre-authorization. Whether you request it or the provider decides it’s necessary while you’re blotto.
Not a hospital worker but I work in health insurance so have an idea of the state of the industry.
Yes, every hospital for acute medical care built in the 90s or later will have all private rooms. That’s the new standard for patient care as well as patient expectations. Besides the obvious advantages for infection control, increasingly only the sickest of the sick patients are hospitalized inpatient- my neices daughter had her appendix removed and that was done outpatient, as opposed to a high school classmate of mine that was in there multiple days back around 1990.
If you get hit by a bus you’re not going to think about the room type hospitals have, but if you’re a choice patient needing high profit care like elective spine surgery, you are. I recall a consult with a spine surgeon I asked what hospital he used and he said “——–, I know what you’re thinking, they don’t have private rooms there. But don’t worry unless there’s a complication you won’t be admitted overnight”. From sharing bedrooms becoming rare to the disappearance of communual showers, society is just exepecting and demanding more privacy.
Hospitals generally prefer to just raze their old building and build a brand new one with private rooms rather than just removing a bed due to a private room not being as big as a semi-private, doing so messing up the ratio of nursing stations and whatnot, and the general wear and tear and ineffeciency issues with any hospital that’s old enough to have shared rooms. A lot of times they like to even find a brand new site, they can leave the entire old hospital operations until moving day rather than try to demolish and rebuild on an operating campus.
Insurance wise they submit a specific code on the claim that means “semi-private room not available”. Our system is smart enough to automatically adjudicate these without applying a penalty for a private room.
My first hospital stay, in 1989, I shared a room with an elderly woman who was somewhat incontinent and had a potty seat right next to the bed. Me, I had to walk down the hall to pee. That was an awful experience for many ways. But if I’d been solo, I could have put the TV on or something to try to deal with the hellish insomnia. Dunno if the TV would have been an extra cost - it used to be!
For every hospitalization since then (2 kids, 1 gallbladder) I’ve requested and gotten a private room. Interestingly, I’ve never had insurance deny whatever the extra cost is.
23 years ago, a friend was hospitalized before having her baby, and she was in a shared room. Another friend who had surgery at that same hospital was given a private room by default - I think it was standard as they renovated.
I have surgery coming up next year which will require at least 2 nights in the hospital afterward. I’ll demand a private room again - partly because that time, my husband will be staying at least the first night, to look out for the kind of medication etc. screwups I’ve encountered before.
Even if you have a pre-auth, nobody will tell you what it costs! And then you often have the fun of a night in the hospital being denied by insurance as “not medically necessary”, after the fact.
That raises the question of what exactly is a “guest bed”. When my kids were born, there was an armchair in the room that could be converted to a bed, of sorts, for the father. Hopefully there will be something similar for my upcoming visit.
Somewhat surprisingly, the room that my MIL is in has both a bed and one of those hospital recliners that makes into a “bed” that you could sleep in if there were no other alternatives. My wife says that the guest bed is actually pretty comfortable and better than many hotel beds that we’ve slept on.
That sounds about like what I expected.
Naturally my husband didn’t sleep terribly well, either time - once was because the newborn was in the room with us, the other time, I was still basically in intensive care and the baby was in the NICU - neither was exactly conducive to sleep. For the upcoming one, he’ll have been waiting around the hospital for about 12 hours or more, poor guy, so he might be out like a light.
When the Younger Ottlet was first hospitalized for what turned to be Crohn’s, I didn’t leave the hospital for five days, sleeping on what was optimistically called a “parent accommodation chair.” When I finally got out to go home and take a shower, I found that I couldn’t fold myself up to get into the car.
Thanks. Now I know what to call the bed in our guest bedroom when my MIL gets out of the hospital.
When Dweezil spent the night in the hospital after a nasty broken bone, I too stayed in such a chair. I won’t call what I did there “sleeping”…. he was in pain, and fussy, and the staff had brought in a VCR with a Teletubbies video that ran for 45 minutes. So….. every 45 minutes, I had to get up and rewind that thing. The next morning, when he was discharged, I drove him home, all the while he was wailing “I want to go back to the hospital. I SAID, I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE HOSPITAL!”.
I don’t know whether the peds ward routinely had only single rooms back then (27 years ago), or whether the doctor specifically ordered one because of Dweezil’s autism (possibly the latter). It was one of the most insane days of my parenting life, likely only exceeded by the day Moon Unit was born. My husband was out of town the day of the broken arm, and was maybe not going to be back that night. I called him and told him “you ARE coming home tonight”. Luckily he was just 3 hours away, and driving. And I called friends and asked them to take care of Moon Unit once the nanny needed to leave, as my husband wouldn’t be home in time and I wasn’t going to leave Dweezil alone in the hospital.
Ahhhh, good times (???).
My 83 year old uncle has been in a hospital geriatric ward recently. Communal Nightingale wards, six in each. They did separate out men and women, though - in some places they can’t even do that.
Thank you, this is most informative.
You may have to sign something agreeing to pay the differential, if insurance won’t cover it. When I was admitted for my daughter’s delivery - I was in for several days before they decided she had to come out NOW - I think I did so. Ultimately I was not billed for it - and it was not that much - maybe 75 a day.
I think with my son’s broken arm, the was able to make a medical case: developmentally disabled (autism). It frankly made the nurses’ jobs easier, having me there to deal with the minute to minute issues; I have to assume they’d have needed to have him basically in a giant crib, otherwise.
A shared hospital room means, to me, that, I will not have any way of coping with the inevitable insomnia that made my first such visit so hellish. Plus the disturbances from nurses caring for the roommate.
A big ward, like you see in movies set before rooms were common, may be easier on the staff - they don’t have to run around as much, and they can see if anything is going wrong. I’ve never experienced anything like that except in the post-anesthesia area after surgery.
After my father’s heart surgery, when he was in his high 80s, I stayed with him overnight to make sure he didn’t rip the tubing out of his arms. I “slept” in one of those. It was not a standard room, more like a recovery room.
When my kids were born in the ‘80s Princeton Medical Center (the old one, in downtown Princeton) had shared maternity rooms as default. I don’t think we had the option of a private room. When my daughters had babies they were all in private rooms. I think the age of the facility has a lot to do with it.
There was one of those in the room when Mrs. Martian was in labor with our first kid. After a number of hours labor slowed down and I suggested that maybe I would just recline and take a nap until something happened.
Let’s just say that my suggestion was not well received.
The New York Times ran an article about a decade ago about Princeton’s new hospital. It said “For starters, the rooms are singles; there are no double rooms. Research shows that patients sharing rooms provide doctors with less critical information (even less if the other patient has guests). Ample space is given to visitors because the presence of family and friends has been shown to hasten recovery.”
One hospital - it might have been that one, or another, had the innovation of having a handrail running from the bed to the bathroom, which decreased the number of falls in the night significantly.
The old Medical Center at Princeton was kind of an old dump. I spent my only hospital night there. I think I was in a double room, but had no roommate. We left before they built the new one.
That NYT article on the new Princeton hospital mentions such a handrail.
There are also some fine points to the Princeton plan, like a sink positioned in plain sight, so nurses and doctors will be sure to wash their hands, and patients can watch them do so. A second sink is in the bathroom, which is next to the bed, a handrail linking bed and bathroom, so patients don’t have to travel far between them and will fall less often.