Healthcare Blue Book Survey: How Much Will Your Surgery Cost?

WASHINGTON-- Patients are the losers in both the Democratic and Republican versions of the healthcare reform bills.  Proposed healthcare reform won't help patients find out how much healthcare costs before they get care and many hospitals aren't set up to help.

A new research paper from The Healthcare Blue Book (www.healthcarebluebook.com) entitled Surgery Pricing Secrets: The Challenges Patients Face, shows that it is almost impossible to get prices ahead of time if a patient plans to have surgery in a hospital.

Healthcare Blue Book researchers found that:

• It took three times as many phone calls and four times as long to get pricing information from a hospital.
• Hospitals would not provide guaranteed prices and price ranges often varied by more than 100 percent.
• ASCs were more likely to discount prices for cash customers; regardless of the patient's financial status.
• Facility fees are 3-4 times higher in a hospital than in an ASC.

Healthcare Blue Book researchers contacted hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) in three markets:  Raleigh-Durham, NC; Denver, CO; and Portland, OR.  Hospitals and ASCs were asked to provide the costs of an anterior cruciate ligament surgery of the knee for a patient without health insurance.

Queries were primarily about facility fees, but researchers also asked respondents about other fees associated with the surgery.

It's almost certain healthcare expenditures, which totaled about $2.5 trillion in 2009, will continue to climb by at least 6 percent a year. Hospital costs are 31 percent of the total according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). So what are healthcare consumers going to do?