[chimeracoder]

> There have been some immensely interesting articles about price variations in chargemaster documents between hospitals.

In isolation, those prices are meaningless and can't be compared between two different hospital - even two different hospitals in the same network.

Hospitals make a marginal loss on patients who are on Medicare and Medicaid. They mark up the list prices of everything else to private insurers in order to make up the difference. The way that those markups are distributed doesn't really reveal anything, and even the aggregate size of the markup doesn't reveal anything other than a vague correlation with the proportion of their patient population that is on public insurance.

(That's even assuming that the private insurers pay the prices they are charged, which is never true - they negotiate for lower prices, although they are still required to pay more than Medicare does).