Despite the federal government’s efforts to foster pricing transparency at hospitals, a new study finds that many hospitals can’t provide a price for a common surgical procedure.
A recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine tracked the cost of hip replacement surgery at hospitals across the country.
Researchers contacted two hospitals in each state that offer hip replacement surgery plus 20 top-ranked orthopedic hospitals that were listed in the U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of best hospitals.
Via telephone, researchers asked for the lowest complete bundled cost, including hospital and physician fees, for an elective total hip arthroplasty for a 62-year old woman.
Fewer than half (45 percent) of the ranked hospitals were able to offer a complete bundled price for total hip arthroplasty. Non-ranked hospitals were even less helpful: Only one in 10 provided a price.
Of the facilities that did offer pricing, the range of fees varied widely. Among ranked hospitals, it went from $12,500 to $105,000. At less-well-known hospitals, prices topped out at almost $126,000 ($11,100 to $125,798).
“Obtaining pricing information was difficult and frequently required multiple conversations with numerous staff members at each hospital as well as affiliated physician offices,” wrote the report’s authors.
In recent years, the federal government has made a concerted effort to foster pricing transparency. Twenty-five now have healthcare pricing transparency laws in place.
“Hospital administrators, providers and leadership should be prepared for patients to inquire about prices,” said Jaime Rosenthal, one of the authors of the report. “In many cases, none of these parties have pricing information readily available, so I suspect it will take major efforts to make these data available.”
In an editorial accompanying the report, Andrew Steinmetz and Ezekiel Emmanuel, from the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that even if hospitals could provide full pricing on their procedures, it would have “almost no value when it is not accompanied by rigorous data to measure quality—data like postoperative mortality, infection rates and 6-month redo rates.”