A lipid panel is one of the most basic blood tests in modern medicine. Doctors use it to measure cholesterol levels in their patients, probably millions of times each year.
This is not a procedure where some hospitals are really great at lipid panels and some are terrible. There’s just not space for quality variation: you are running blood through a machine and pressing buttons. That’s it.
And that all makes it a bit baffling why, in California, a lipid panel can cost anywhere between $10 and $10,000. In either case, it is the exact same test.
“What we were trying to see is, when we get down the simplest, most basic form of medicine, how much variation is there in price?” says Renee Hsia, an associate professor at University of California, San Francisco who published the price data in a new study.
“It shows how big the variation really is. We’re not talking twofold or threefold differences, its a completely different level of magnitude.”
More than 100 hospitals — with more than 100 different prices
For this research, published Friday in the British Medical Journal, Hsia and her colleagues compiled reams of data about how much more than 100 hospitals charged for basic blood work. The prices these facilities charged consumers were all over the map.
The charge for a lipid panel ranged from $10 to $10,169. Hospital prices for a basic metabolic panel (which doctors use to measure the body’s metabolism) were $35 at one facility — and $7,303 at another.
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