A Closer Look at Hospital Prices for Knee Replacements
A Consumer Viewpoint on Discerning Hospital Value for Knee Replacements This article explains how information from CMS, a government agency can help you decide where to have your next knee replacement. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid provide regular reliable information on hospital safety metrics and pricing, both for gross hospital charges and for net reimbursements. For many health care consumers, it is the gross charge figure which is of concern, because if you have private insurance or God-forbid-are-uninsured, what you actually pay for your health care procedure will be based on this number. Since workers and families are so much more mobile now, it pays for the health care consumer to shop around for the best consumer value. Presently there are a number of Medicare and federal government initiatives addressing hospital price transparency, so I examined a number of CMS circulars to assess hospital data from 2011 for procedures and prices. The May 2013 CMS circular on Hospit...