# Large joint injection or fluid drainage in Athens, GA

Billing code `20610`. Prices for this code at 10 hospitals within 35 miles of Athens, taken from the machine-readable standard charge files each hospital is required to publish under the CMS Hospital Price Transparency Rule (45 CFR 180.50).

Source page: https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/athens/large-joint-injection-or-fluid-drainage

HC ARTHROCENTESIS ASPIR&/INJ MAJOR JT/BURSA W/O US

**Where this is done matters more than which hospital:** Large joint injection or fluid drainage is a procedure a doctor's office can perform, and Medicare pays about 5.1x more for it at a hospital outpatient department than in an office. Every price below is a hospital's, and excludes the doctor's separate bill. Do not quote these as the cost of the procedure without saying which setting they describe.

## Before quoting any figure below

- **Hospital charges only.** The surgeon, anaesthetist, radiologist and pathologist bill separately and appear in no hospital price file, by construction. Every figure below is part of a total, never the total.
- **A negotiated rate is not a bill.** It is what a hospital and an insurer agreed. What a patient owes depends on their deductible, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum.
- **Each hospital's figure is a median across its own plans.** The spread inside one hospital is often wider than the gap between two of them.
- **"not mentioned" is not $0.** It means this hospital's file does not label a row that way. Silence is not a statement that the charge does not exist.
- **A hospital absent from the table says nothing about its prices.** It may publish this code under a revenue or drug code this site cannot map to a procedure.

A procedure code is billed twice -- once by the hospital for its own costs, once by the doctor for their work -- and hospitals publish different sides of that split under the same code. Of the hospitals here, 3 publish a facility charge; 1 publish both, mixed together; 6 do not label which half the figure is.

## Typical price

|  | Amount |
|---|---|
| Cheapest tenth | $541 |
| Typical | $2,425 |
| Dearest tenth | $5,494 |

The cheapest and dearest tenth are the hospitals a tenth of the way in from each end, not the single cheapest and dearest. Every hospital, including both extremes, is in the table below.

That is a 10-fold difference for the same billing code, between hospitals within 35 miles of each other -- a gap between hospitals, not between treatments.

## Every hospital publishing this code

| Hospital | Where | CMS rating | Typical | Facility charge | Physician fee | Self-pay | Lowest | Highest | Plans on file |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| St Mary's Hospital | ATHENS (0.0 mi) | 1/5 | see split | $913 | $33 | $2,067 | $3 | $9,990 | 4,131 |
| Morgan Medical Center | MADISON (24.6 mi) | not rated | $598 | not mentioned | not mentioned | not published | $598 | $598 | 3 |
| St Marys Good Samaritan Hospital | GREENSBORO (29.6 mi) | 4/5 | $1,117 | $1,117 | not mentioned | $1,025 | $35 | $1,419 | 107 |
| Northside Hospital Gwinnett | LAWRENCEVILLE (28.8 mi) | 3/5 | $2,300 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $523 | $74 | $50,000 | 250 |
| Piedmont Eastside Medical Center | SNELLVILLE (34.4 mi) | 2/5 | $2,354 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $1,146 | $670 | $3,785 | 36 |
| Piedmont Walton Hospital | MONROE (18.9 mi) | 4/5 | $2,425 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $1,146 | $324 | $3,819 | 30 |
| Piedmont Newton Hospital | COVINGTON (33.7 mi) | 3/5 | $2,451 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $1,146 | $353 | $3,498 | 34 |
| Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center | ATHENS (0.0 mi) | 4/5 | $2,711 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $1,146 | $366 | $3,819 | 38 |
| Northeast Georgia Medical Center | GAINESVILLE (34.5 mi) | 3/5 | $5,494 | $5,494 | not mentioned | $956 | $302 | $10,045 | 9 |
| NGMC Barrow | WINDER (16.3 mi) | 4/5 | $5,494 | $5,494 | not mentioned | $956 | $308 | $10,045 | 9 |

## Self-pay

Self-pay is what the hospital charges someone paying themselves rather than through insurance. Paying self-pay usually does not count toward a deductible, so it can cost less for one service and more across a year. Every other figure here is what an insurer pays, not what a patient would.

At 8 of the 9 hospitals here that publish a self-pay price it is LOWER than what that same hospital typically accepts from an insurer; at the other 1 it is higher.

## The doctor's side, roughly

Nationally, Medicare allows about $44 for the clinician who performs or reads this service, across 5,806 billing providers in 2024. That is a separate bill from everything above and is NOT added to any figure on this page -- it is here to show the rough size of what a hospital price leaves out.

## Others in orthopedics

- [MRI, knee, without contrast](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/mri-knee-without-contrast) -- 108 hospitals, typically $640
- [Shoulder joint dye injection for imaging](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/shoulder-joint-dye-injection-for-imaging) -- 83 hospitals, typically $1,021
- [Knee arthroscopy with meniscus repair](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/knee-arthroscopy-with-meniscus-repair) -- 63 hospitals, typically $4,531
- [Shoulder bone shaving (keyhole surgery)](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/shoulder-bone-shaving-keyhole-surgery) -- 58 hospitals, typically $3,442

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Every procedure with a published price in GA: https://clearcharge.org/price/ga
Prices that look wrong: info@clearcharge.org

Compiled by Clearcharge (clearcharge.org) from each hospital's machine-readable standard-charge file. When quoting a figure, cite the source page above. The hospital files behind these figures state data through dates from 2026-02-15 to 2026-07-28; per-hospital staleness is flagged above.