+- AlienBabelTech Forums (http://alienbabeltech.com/forum)
+-- Forum: Social (http://alienbabeltech.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=3)
+--- Forum: News & Politics (http://alienbabeltech.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=5)
+--- Thread: American Hospitals charging over $10,000 for $10 blood test (/showthread.php?tid=324)
American Hospitals charging over $10,000 for $10 blood test - dmcowen674 - 03-11-2015
3-10-2015
American Hospitals charging over $10,000 for $10 blood test
A lipid panel is one of the most basic blood tests in modern medicine. Doctors use it to measure cholesterol levels in their patients, probably millions of times each year.
This is not a procedure where some hospitals are really great at lipid panels and some are terrible. There's just not space for quality variation: you are running blood through a machine and pressing buttons. That's it.
And that all makes it a bit baffling why, in California, a lipid panel can cost anywhere between $10 and $10,000. In either case, it is the exact same test.
"What we were trying to see is, when we get down the simplest, most basic form of medicine, how much variation is there in price?" says Renee Hsia, an associate professor at University of California, San Francisco who published the price data in a recent study.
For this research, published in August in the British Medical Journal, Hsia and her colleagues compiled reams of data about how much more than 100 hospitals charged for basic blood work. The prices these facilities charged consumers were all over the map.
The charge for a lipid panel ranged from $10 to $10,169. Hospital prices for a basic metabolic panel (which doctors use to measure the body's metabolism) were $35 at one facility — and $7,303 at another.
This huge variation in the price of a really simple, incredibly basic blood test tells us a few things about the American health care system.
Blood tests aren't the only place with this variation
Hsia's previous research looked at the cost of an appendectomy in California and found similarly gigantic variation. For an appendectomy with no complications, she found that hospitals in the state would charge anywhere between $1,529 and $186,955.
What this tells us about American health care
For one, there's not much price transparency: it's really hard to know whether one hospital is charging $10 or $10,169 because prices are rarely listed.
The $10,169 blood test tells us we're suckers: we've developed a health care system where its hospitals have pretty full authority to name their price with little protest from consumers.
Getting a $10,000 blood test can put a patient into bankruptcy. But right now, our health care system doesn't have the mechanisms to limit those high charges — nor would the patient likely have the tools to know the cost of his or her blood test to begin with.
"There's no other industry where you see this kind of extreme variation," Hsia says. "And nobody has ever really challenged it. It shows an extreme inefficiency, and something we really need to change."