Need knee replacement surgery? It may be worthwhile to head for Tucson.
That's because the average price for a knee replacement in the Arizona city is $21,976, about $38,000 less than it would in Sacramento, Calif. That's according to a report issued Wednesday by the Health Care Cost Institute.
The report, called the National Chartbook on Health Care Prices, uses claims and payment data from three of the largest insurance companies in the U.S. to analyze how prices for procedures vary from state to state, and city to city.
The takeaway?
Health care prices are crazy.
"There doesn't seem to be a systematic pattern with respect to what's high and what's low," says David Newman, HCCI's executive director. Newman is lead author of an article published Wednesday online in the journal Health Affairs that accompanied the release of the Chartbook.
The reports compare average state prices for 242 medical services — from primary doctor visits to coronary angioplasty to a foot x-ray — to the national average price for those services. It shows that states such as Minnesota and Wisconsin have higher than average prices while others, such as Florida and Maryland, were cheaper overall.
