10 U.S. Hospitals With a Price Markup of 1,000 Percent

Try not to get too sick on your next vacation to Florida.

The Sunshine State is home to 20 of the hospitals with the highest price markups in the nation, according to a new study published in the journal Health Affairs this week.

The authors — Gerard Anderson, a professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of its Center for Hospital Finance and Management; and Ge Bai, an assistant professor of accounting at Washington and Lee University — studied the 50 U.S. hospitals with the highest charge-to-cost ratios in 2012.

The authors looked at each hospital’s lists of procedure codes and corresponding prices and compared them with the costs that Medicare allows for such procedures.

Using these Medicare-allowed amounts as a stand-in for costs, the authors found that these hospitals charged an average of 10 times more for a given service than the fixed cost that Medicare would have paid the health care provider who performed the service if the patient had Medicare insurance.

Medicare is a federally subsidized health insurance program generally reserved for senior citizens.

The markups at the hospitals in the study compare with a national average markup of 3.4 times Medicare-allowable costs.

The study explains:

While most public and private health insurers do not use hospital charges to set their payment rates, uninsured patients are commonly asked to pay the full charges, and out-of-network patients and casualty and workers’ compensation insurers are often expected to pay a large portion of the full charges.

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