Wonder why one hospital charges $59 for a blood panel and another – only 15 miles away – charges over $525? You’ll need an advanced degree to figure it out.
The federal government’s new rule requiring hospitals to post prices for their services is intended to allow patients to shop around and compare prices, a step toward price transparency that California has mandated since 2005.
California Healthline. By Harriet Blair Rowan. January 24, 2019
California Healthline examined the price lists — known in hospital lingo as “chargemasters” — of four large acute care hospitals in Oakland, Calif., and another four in Los Angeles, using the documents California hospitals have been reporting annually to the California Department of Public Health — the same information the federal government is now requiring all hospitals to post on their websites.
The comparison of some basic procedures found wide-ranging prices, sometimes between hospitals that are part of the same network or located just miles from each other. For instance, the list price on a liter of basic saline solution for intravenous use ranged from $56 to $383, nearly seven times as much. A brain MRI with contrast was priced from $3,200 to $8,800 at the hospitals.
Here are examples of extreme price ranges, from northern & southern California, drawn from original California Healthline article):
Price of a liter of IV fluid
Kaiser Permanente-Oakland & Richmond = $56
Highland Hospital, Oakland = $129
UCLA Children’s Hospital = $146
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center = $383
Price of a Brain MRA With Contrast
Highland Hospital, Oakland = $3,211
Kaiser Permanente-Oakland & Richmond = $6,772
UCLA Children’s Hospital = $3,781
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center = $8,793
Price of a Semi-Private Room
Alta Bates Summit Medical Center = $4,995
Highland Hospital = $8,753
Keck Hospital of USC = $2,858
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center = $8,534
Price of a Complete Blood Count with Differential
Kaiser Permanente-Oakland and Richmond = $106
UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital = $372
Keck Hospital of USC = $59.86
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center = $525.46
Whether you will be able to determine the best prices when you have a need for a hospital is another question. KHN senior correspondent Julie Appleby and California Healthline’s Barbara Feder Ostrov recently wrote about this new rule and found price lists befuddling to most anyone without an advanced medical degree.
Harriet Blair Rowan: hrowan@kff.org, @HattieRowan
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