After the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released pricing information on more than 3,000 hospitals across the country earlier this week, we decided we would do some local price comparisons. As WABE’s Jim Burress noted in his news story about the release of the pricing data, hospitals charge wildly divergent prices for common treatments or procedures (pneumonia, joint replacement, heart attack).
It’s one thing to say prices are wildly divergent, but it’s something else entirely to see the disparities laid out in a chart.
We’ve taken 11 of the most widely performed hospital treatments and compared the average charges for each of them from 14 major metro Atlanta hospitals. For these procedures, the variation in cost between hospitals averaged a whopping 352%.
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