Imagine getting the bill for an ordinary dinner and noticing, in tiny print, that the restaurant charged you $40 for coffee. Surely you'd be upset.
It turns out that hospitals inflate specific prices all the time in ways that aren't transparent to the patient, according to a new study that appeared today (Sept. 7) in the journal Health Affairs.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that many hospitals charged more than 20 times the cost of some services, particularly for certain services like CT scans and anesthesiology. The researchers said that the pattern of charging suggests that hospitals strategically look for surreptitious ways to boost revenue.
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