The Washington Post recently issued a report ranking the top 50 hospitals in the United States with the highest markup of prices over their actual costs. That means that they are charging out-of-network patients and the uninsured, as well as auto and workers’ compensation insurers, more than 10 times the costs allowed by Medicare.
The bigger story is this: the issue of price gouging is much bigger than these top (bottom?) 50 hospitals. If we had a dot on the map for every hospital charging more than 500% of Medicare it would look like a cell coverage map. This phenomenon exists in every hospital in America.