From the webpage:
As part of the Obama administration’s work to make our health care system more affordable and accountable, data are being released that show significant variation across the country and within communities in what hospitals charge for common inpatient services.
The data provided here include hospital-specific charges for the more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals that receive Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) payments for the top 100 most frequently billed discharges, paid under Medicare based on a rate per discharge using the Medicare Severity Diagnosis Related Group (MS-DRG) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2011. These DRGs represent almost 7 million discharges or 60 percent of total Medicare IPPS discharges.
Hospitals determine what they will charge for items and services provided to patients and these charges are the amount the hospital bills for an item or service. The Total Payment amount includes the MS-DRG amount, bill total per diem, beneficiary primary payer claim payment amount, beneficiary Part A coinsurance amount, beneficiary deductible amount, beneficiary blood deducible amount and DRG outlier amount.
For these DRGs, average charges and average Medicare payments are calculated at the individual hospital level. Users will be able to make comparisons between the amount charged by individual hospitals within local markets, and nationwide, for services that might be furnished in connection with a particular inpatient stay.
Data are being made available in Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) format and comma separated values (.csv) format.
Inpatient Charge Data, FY2011, Microsoft Excel version
Inpatient Charge Data, FY2011, Comma Separated Values (CSV) version
A nice start towards a useful data set.
Next step would be tying identifiable physicians with ordered medical procedures and tests.
The only times I have arrived at a hospital by ambulance, I never thought to ask for a comparison of their prices with other local hospitals. Nor did I see any signs advertising discounts on particular procedures.
Have you?
Let’s not pretend medical care is a consumer market, where “consumers” are penalized for not being good shoppers.
I first saw this at Nathan Yau’s Medicare provider charge data released.