# Laser treatment for clouding after cataract surgery in Macon, GA

Billing code `66821`. Prices for this code at 6 hospitals within 35 miles of Macon, 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/macon/laser-treatment-for-clouding-after-cataract-surgery

After cataract laser surgery

**Where this is done matters more than which hospital:** Laser treatment for clouding after cataract surgery is a procedure a doctor's office can perform, and Medicare pays about 2.5x 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 Do not quote these as the cost of the procedure without saying which setting they describe.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, 1 publish a facility charge; 3 publish both, mixed together; 2 do not label which half the figure is.

## Typical price

|  | Amount |
|---|---|
| Lowest reported | $362 |
| Typical | $1,032 |
| Highest reported | $1,045 |

Too few hospitals here for a decile to mean anything, so these are the true extremes and a single unusual figure can set one of them.

## Every hospital publishing this code

| Hospital | Where | CMS rating | Typical | Facility charge | Physician fee | Self-pay | Lowest | Highest | Plans on file |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atrium Health Navicent Peach | BYRON (16.2 mi) | 1/5 | see split | $2,120 | $336 | not published | $321 | $2,120 | 21 |
| Navicent Health Baldwin | MILLEDGEVILLE (26.5 mi) | 2/5 | see split | $543 | $314 | not published | $279 | $5,479 | 30 |
| Atrium Health Navicent the Medical Center | MACON (3.2 mi) | 2/5 | see split | $1,060 | $355 | not published | $279 | $5,079 | 38 |
| Piedmont Macon North Hospital | MACON (7.8 mi) | 4/5 | $1,032 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $424 | $130 | $1,414 | 17 |
| Coliseum Medical Centers | MACON (6.9 mi) | 3/5 | $1,032 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $424 | $97 | $1,414 | 17 |
| Emory Houston Hospital Warner Robins | WARNER ROBINS (14.3 mi) | 2/5 | $1,045 | $1,045 | not mentioned | not published | $493 | $5,346 | 13 |

## 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 2 of the 2 hospitals here that publish a self-pay price it is LOWER than what that same hospital typically accepts from an insurer; at the other 0 it is higher.

## The doctor's side, roughly

Nationally, Medicare allows about $285 for the clinician who performs or reads this service, across 4,178 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 eye care

- [Cataract removal with lens implant](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/cataract-removal-with-lens-implant) -- 61 hospitals, typically $4,178

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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 2025-11-19 to 2026-07-01; per-hospital staleness is flagged above.