MORRISTOWN (WATE) – A Tennova Healthcare hospital was number 31 on a list of United States hospitals with the highest markup prices over their actual costs.
Tennova Healthcare’s Lakeway Regional Hospital in Morristown had markups that were more than 10 times the costs allowed by Medicare according to The Washington Post. The ranking was based on a study by Health Affairs, a peer reviewed healthcare journal.
“These are the hospitals that have the highest markup of all 5,000 hospitals in the United States. This means when it costs the hospital $100, they are going to charge you, on average, $1,000,” said Gerard Anderson, the co-author of the study and a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Lakeway Regional Hospital’s mark-ups were marked-up 960 percent. By comparison, The Washington Post said a typical U.S. hospital charges 3.4 times the cost of patient care.
Officials representing the 50 hospitals disputed the findings, saying that they provide significant discounts to uninsured and underinsured patients.
The study recommends that federal and state governments may want to consider limits hospitals can charge on the actual cost of treatment and regulate hospital markups.
