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Health care costs can vary wildly

By Staff | May 13, 2013

People in New Hampshire who want to figure out the difference in health care costs between hospitals are better off than most.

New Hampshire is one of the only states with a health care calculator to determine how much certain procedures cost at one hospital versus another.

But this little piece of good news simply reveals what most people already know: health care costs vary wildly depending on where you get your care and what kind of insurance you have.

Case in point: an ultrasound during a pregnancy can cost about $350 at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center, but more than $600 at Parkland Medical Center in Derry and $650 at Exeter Hospital.

Depending on your insurance and your deductible amount, you may pay a fraction of that cost, or all of it.

Or, if you have no insurance at all and go to an emergency room with a cut that requires stitches, Exeter Hospital and Parkland are among the cheapest, with the visit costing $204 and $245, according to the calculator. The same visit costs more than $800 at Southern New Hampshire in Nashua and more than $900 at Concord Hospital.

The numbers prove that hospitals often charge more than three times as much for the same procedure, and there’s no intuitive reason for why.

It’s a handy tool, but its also unlikely that someone who has a bleeding cut is going to stop by a computer and figure out where they can get their wound stitched up the cheapest.

When it comes to health care, people want the absolute best care, and they it close by. No one wants to spend hours in a car when they feel ill.

However, Edgar Helms, founding director of the NH Institute for Health Policy and Practice at UNH suggested if more information about hospital costs becomes available, people may be willing to engage in “medical tourism” and drive to different hospitals to get the best deal on their health care.

Maybe.

And just last week another mountain of medical data was released on Medicare charges for 100 common procedures made in 2011 by 3,100 hospitals around the country, released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

These numbers used to be proprietary and people who wanted to see them had to pay for the information. This is the first time they’ve been publicly available.

Readers can access a searchable database of what New Hampshire hospitals charge Medicare patients on our website.

All of these numbers are a start. And the point is to make people more aware about what they are paying for health care.

“This exposes to a much larger number of people the fact: ‘You mean if I go to different (hospitals) I’ll be paying 60 percent more? Why is that? … It starts helping us all understand more about the health system,” Helms said.

But the real goal here is that informed customers, both employees and employers, would begin paying less for their health care.

After all, heath care costs related to a serious illness are still among th most common reasons for people losing their life savings, even becoming homeless.

Raising the curtain on the once-secret formulas between health care costs and insurance reimbursements is important work.

And when people start asking about health care costs before they go to the hospital, they’ll be able to make smarter decisions that won’t cost them an arm and a leg.

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