HOSPITAL PRICES

You can negotiate them.

West's company – Group & Pension Administrators Inc. of Dallas – is defying this trend. When a hospital submits a claim, GPA staffers ignore the charges. They check the data hospitals report to Medicare, where hospitals show their actual costs for each procedure. Then GPA pays those costs, plus 12 percent for the hospital's profit.

For a patient who stayed three days in an Austin hospital after knee surgery, that payment method reduced the bill from $69,000 to $15,000. For another patient, the bill fell from $11,000 to $1,000, West said.