Effective January 1, 2021, Trump-era federal regulations require all hospitals accepting Medicare payments to fully disclose their standard charge for everything they do. Writing in the Duluth News Tribune, Greg Dattilo and Dave Racer explain how well this requirement is working.
There is … a serious flaw in this hospital price discloser process and result – the data is incredibly complex and indecipherable to anyone without a post-doctoral degree in health care finance.
Lakeview hospital in Stillwater is small. Its published “machine-readable” list of hospital prices takes up 13,468 lines on an Excel spreadsheet. If you knew the procedural terms you would discover, for example, that an “Inflammatory Bowel Disease With McD” carried a price of $21,782.55. But an “Inflammatory Bowel Disease with Cc” is only $8,712.05. About the only conclusion you can draw from this data is you’d better hope your problem is a “Cc” not an “McD,” whatever that is.
Wrestling with 13,468 lines of prices to decide whether to buy your next hip surgery at Lakeview Hospital is a huge challenge. It pales in comparison to St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, affiliated with the Mayo Clinics.
There are 1,048,575 lines of data on the St. Mary’s Hospital standard charges disclosure sheet. Don’t try to compare the Inflammatory Bowel Disease procedure cost at Lakeview with St. Mary’s – they call it something else at St. Mary’s.