Health Care Prices are All Over The Place Depending on Where You Go for Treatment

It’s a frustrating reality of the medical marketplace: Prices are all over the map.

If you need an angioplasty to treat heart disease in Birmingham, Ala., it will cost about $15,500. But the identical procedure in Sacramento will cost four times as much.

And even within the same Boston-area market, the price of removing a common type of skin cancer can vary by hundreds of dollars depending on which hospital you go to.

Prices vary wildly from city to city and hospital to hospital for all sorts of medical care, and it’s nearly impossible to get a straight answer ahead of time on what you’ll pay. That means real consequences for family budgets now that consumers must pick up a greater-than-ever share of the health care tab.

Dave DeBronkart, 65, of Nashua, N.H., has suffered 

from two types of cancer and has had great success - and 

frustrations - shopping around for care given his very high 

deductible plan. (Photo: Zack DeClerck for USA TODAY

New Hampshire patient advocate Dave deBronkart spent three months shopping for care and researching costs before being treated for basal cell carcinoma on his jaw line three years ago. Facing a $10,000 insurance deductible that he had to pay before insurance kicked in, he examined options for treatment at three different Boston-area hospitals. He was told that one treatment, an excision, would cost up to $2,062 at one hospital, up to $2,500 at another and up to $4,010 at a third. Prices for other treatments also varied substantially by hospital.

“There can be no explanation other than some secret malarkey going on,” says deBronkart, 65. “I feel disempowered and disrespected, because aside from the incredible cost crunch we’re all experiencing, it’s a downright sin that my family can’t readily find out what the options are and what the costs are.”

Nothing has changed, he says, since Princeton University health care economics scholar Uwe Reinhardt wrote his famous 2006 article in the journal Health Affairs captured perfectly by its title: “The Pricing of U.S. Hospital Services: Chaos Behind a Veil of Secrecy.”

Read the rest of the article HERE.

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