For years, there was no way for an average person to really shop around when it came to hospitals. The system truly was like this video:
Now the actual prices for common procedures are seeing the light of day.
As part of national health care reform, the Obama administration released the average prices charged at 3,000 hospitals around the nation for the 100 most common medical procedures.
Even experts were shocked and couldn’t explain the vast differences in prices charged to consumers. Check out this excerpt from the story published by the News Tribune on May 9:
Inpatient charges to treat heart failure in Denver hospitals, for instance, ranged from a low of $21,000 to a high cost of $46,000, while the same procedure ranged from $9,000 to $51,000 at hospitals in Jackson, Miss. Inpatient costs related to joint replacement ranged from $5,300 at a hospital in Ada, Okla., up to a high of $223,000 at a hospital in Monterey Park, Calif.
That kind of price disparity puzzled Jon Blum, director of the federal Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. He said the cost variations could possibly reflect the health status of the patient, whether a hospital charges more because it trains future doctors, and even whether a hospital has higher capital costs that are passed on to patients.
But Blum added: “Those reasons don’t seem very apparent to us.”
He said the charges “don’t seem to make sense to us from a consumer standpoint. There’s no relationship that we see to charges and the quality of care that’s being provided.”
To read the full story, including comparisons of charges by local hospitals, click here.
Bonus: For a more comedic view of this serious problem, check out this bit from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
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