Treatment for chest pain at Bellevue Hospital costs the average patient $9,960. Two blocks up the street at NYU Langone Medical Center, the charge was $16,660.
The cost for a major heart procedure at NYU was $125,392. At New York-Presbyterian, another major teaching hospital, the cost was less than half at $61,406.
The government last week pulled the veil off hospital costs, releasing data on what hospitals nationwide charged in 2011 for common procedures and what Medicare paid for those treatments.
While it’s no surprise that hospitals in Manhattan charge more than those in Missouri or Montana, there were great discrepancies among the city’s hospitals as well.
The average bill for treating pneumonia at New York Community Hospital of Brooklyn in 2011 was $12,833. At Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, it was $31,034.
Lenox Hill, in fact, charged the most for four out of six procedures. The hospital did not return a call for comment.
“I think it kind of shows the pervasive kind of dysfunction in health-care pricing,” said Katherine Hempstead, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in New Jersey.
More than 100,000 people have downloaded the pricing data from CMS.gov, the Web site for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Only those without insurance would pay the official hospital charge and, in New York, hospitals are supposed to discount their rates to low-income patients.
Private insurance companies negotiate payment rates with hospitals, although the starting point for setting those rates may be based on the charge for procedures.
“In that sense, it certainly would affect your premium,” Hempstead said.
Medicare pays hospitals based on formulas that take into account factors such as geography, the number of uninsured patients treated at the hospital and the severity of illness of patients.
“The irony here is that we’re talking about Medicare data, and Medicare pays hospitals less than the cost of care — and nowhere near the amount on a hospital bill,” said Brian Conway, a spokesman for the Greater New York Hospital Association, an industry group.
The $125,392 heart procedure at NYU resulted in an average Medicare payment of $31,509. At New York-Presbyterian, Medicare paid an average $34,522.
NYU released a statement saying, “The initial data should be interpreted with care, as it does not take into account myriad factors that exist in setting charges and reimbursement rates.”
Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for New York-Presbyterian Hospital, said that “charges are based on individual patient needs, and each patient is different.”
“For example, one patient having a joint replacement may have an underlying condition that makes her have to stay in the hospital longer than another patient undergoing the same procedure,” Manners said.