Baptist Memorial Hospital bills Medicare $51,152 for a drug-coated stent insertion, while Methodist Hospital bills Medicare $80,635 and St. Francis Hospital bills $82,211 for the same procedure. All three hospitals are in Shelby County.
To put in a pacemaker, the charges are $51,483 at Baptist, $76,490 at Methodist, and $61,614 at St. Francis. So it goes, for scores of medical procedures at nonprofit and for-profit hospitals all over the country.
What Medicare actually pays is another number, and the same goes for private insurance companies, employer-provided insurance, and the patient. So, assuming you know what a drug-coated stent insertion is, is this a big deal or one of those things like the national debt, public pension obligations, and food additives that is vaguely troubling but too complicated to worry about?
The question comes up following release of a massive amount of data on Medicare this week. The story was reported Wednesday, with some nice context and quotes, by The New York Times and The Washington Post and other news organizations.
For the first time, the federal government released the prices that hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures. The charges have been mostly secret to the average person. What the numbers reveal is a health-care system with lots of variation in the costs of services.
