Price Shopping For Hospitalization

The day that hospital, surgical and medicare care prices will be like shopping for a new car is probably years away but there are signs that it may be moving in that direction. The Journal of the American Medicare Association reported a study to obtain pricing of common elective hip surgery for senior health.

So here is what the researchers did. They contacted two hospitals in every state including Washington D.C. They also selected 20 top ranked orthopedic hospitals around the nation. That resulted in a total of 128 hospitals contacted. So the researchers set a limit of five calls to each hospital to obtain the information.
Here is what they found. Nine of the top-ranked orthopedic hospitals and 10 of the non-top-ranked general hospitals were able to provide a complete bundled price. The range of prices was wide for both top-ranked orthopedic ($12,300 – $105,000) and non-top-ranked general ($11,100 – $125,798) hospitals.
Jeffrey Rice, a former physician and attorney who has developed the Healthcare Blue Book to help consumers comparison-shop and senior health, says a fair price to pay for a hip replacement is about $21,148. But, he adds, “Typically, many hospitals can’t give price estimates, certainly not binding ones. If you are buying a new computer or a cell phone, you know what you’re looking for, but with hip replacement you don’t even know where to start.”
So the upshot of the study found that patients could achieve significant cost-savings by shopping around, but that it was difficult to get pricing information and many health care providers couldn’t cite reasonable price estimates. The study also confirmed that readily available pricing is still a long way off for senior health.

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