Revealing medical procedure prices in Oklahoma

By Jim Stafford

Published: August 31, 2008

Call it sticker shock. It's that wide-eyed look of horrified surprise that new car buyers often display when they walk across a car lot and peer at the retail price listed on the window stickers of new vehicles.

Now Oklahoma health care consumers can experience sticker shock, as well.

The Oklahoma Hospital Association launched a Web site launched late last year that lists the full retail prices for almost any procedure offered at a member hospital in the state.

Launched in December 2007, the site is found at www.OKHospitalPricing.org.

"This was aimed at trying to be more transparent and more accountable to the general public,” said Craig Jones, president of the Hospital Association.

"We wanted to do this in a meaningful way to the public but in a fair way to the hospitals,” Jones said. "There are some educationally oriented kinds of graphs and things on there.

"We want (consumers) to know to look at the overall mix of business that the hospital is doing; look at the amount of charity care, because all of those factors play into what they have to set their prices at.”

Jones emphasized that the prices listed for various hospital procedures are retail prices, and in the health care business, almost no one pays retail.

"What you are charged and what the hospital intends to collect are two totally different things,” he said. "There is a whole lot more detail than what is the sticker price, if you will.”

And all hospitals discount that price for patients who have no insurance coverage, as well.

For instance, the "sticker price” median charge listed on the hospital pricing Web site for a heart catheterization at eight Oklahoma City area hospitals ranged from a low of $14,664 at Deaconess Hospital to a high of $29,719 at Midwest Regional Medical Center.

But that is just a starting point.

"I think the hospitals are very aware that the list price is not relevant to the majority of patients,” said Rick Snyder, vice president of finance and information services for the Hospital Association. "It would be nice to show out of pocket costs, yet this is the information that we had available and this is the starting point.”

Oklahoma doesn't require that hospitals make their information public, so the hospital pricing site is an effort to get out in front of the issue, Jones said.

The next step is making "quality” information public.

"It's a stepping stone toward where we hope to see this evolve,” Jones said.

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