ClearchargeThe same operation, up to 12x apart
Across the ten most common hospital operations in the United States, the price Georgia hospitals publish for the identical billing code varies by up to 12-fold between the cheapest and dearest tenth of hospitals. Every figure below comes from the machine-readable price file each hospital is required to publish under the federal price transparency rule — and is recomputed from those files whenever this page is rebuilt, so the table cannot silently go stale.
| Operation | Hospitals | Cheapest tenth | Typical | Dearest tenth | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gallbladder removal | 69 | $905 | $5,799 | $10,582 | 12x |
| Skin lesion removal | 87 | $366 | $1,735 | $3,927 | 11x |
| Hip fracture repair | 53 | $1,463 | $7,227 | $11,889 | 8x |
| Spinal fusion, lower back | 56 | $3,707 | $12,635 | $19,056 | 5x |
| Hip replacement | 59 | $4,038 | $12,252 | $19,135 | 5x |
| Partial colon removal | 50 | $1,577 | $4,840 | $7,576 | 5x |
| Leg artery angioplasty | 69 | $4,453 | $8,383 | $12,154 | 3x |
| Coronary stent (PCI) | 73 | $10,099 | $12,589 | $25,083 | 2x |
| Perineal tear repair | 71 | $2,561 | $3,656 | $5,617 | 2x |
| Cesarean delivery | 46 | $2,588 | $4,384 | $5,671 | 2x |
Ranked by US inpatient volume (HCUP) — the ten operations, not ten cherry-picked spreads. Hospital counts are the hospitals publishing a comparable price for that code. The hospitals' own files state data through dates from 2024-07-01 to 2026-07-28.
Read “cheapest tenth” and “dearest tenth” literally: the 10th and 90th percentile hospital, not the single cheapest and dearest. Why that choice matters ↓
What this does and doesn't say
The operations where shopping is actually possible — a planned gallbladder removal (12x), a planned hip replacement — sit near the top of the table, and the tools to act on that barely exist outside the hospitals' own raw files. But the spread is not an emergency-pricing story: coronary stenting, often an emergency, has one of the tightest spreads here. The numbers say what they say.
- These are the hospitals' charges only. The surgeon and anaesthetist bill separately and appear in no hospital price file. Every figure is part of a bill, never the bill.
- A negotiated rate is not what a patient pays. It is what a hospital and an insurer agreed; out-of-pocket cost depends on deductible, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum.
- A cheaper hospital is not a worse hospital, and this data cannot say otherwise. No quality claim is made here. Each hospital's page carries its CMS quality measures separately.
- These are published prices, not billed amounts. What a hospital published under 45 CFR 180.50 is what it says it charges.
How this was computed
One figure per hospital first — the median across all its plans for that code — then the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile across hospitals. Never a median over raw rows: a hospital publishing 7,613 plan variants would otherwise outweigh one publishing 12.
Why deciles and not the cheapest and dearest hospital. The naive version produces spreads in the thousands, and they are false: a handful of hospitals publish a $1.00 placeholder against a four-figure gross charge where a contract does not pay that line separately. That is a quirk of the filing format, not a price. Deciles are robust to it — if the spread looks smaller than a headline you have seen elsewhere, this is why, and we think it is a point in the table's favour. The full pipeline, including what is excluded and where the figures are weakest, is on the methodology page.
Check the work
2 of the 10 operations have a full per-hospital comparison page you can open directly — every hospital, cheapest first: Gallbladder removal, Cesarean delivery. The rest are viewable through the operation bundles, and 421 procedures have their own comparison pages. Questions about a figure, or the per-hospital breakdown behind any row: [email protected].