Nobody knows the going rate for a hospital contract.
A drug-eluting stent is manufactured to precise tolerances by a handful of global firms. The price attached to it depends on who is asking — and nobody publishes the answer.
Same wire mesh, seven different prices
A PLOS ONE study of 124 California hospitals found the charge for an angioplasty with a drug-eluting stent ranged from $22,047 to $165,386 — same procedure, no major complications, median $88,350. Observable hospital and market factors explained only 43% of the variation. The rest had no name.
Internationally, the spread is structural: Health Affairs research showed U.S. hospitals paid up to six times what German hospitals paid for cardiac implants, with drug-eluting stents running roughly $1,000 above German prices every year from 2006 to 2014. Manufacturers price the buyer, not the product.
254% of Medicare — and climbing
RAND's 2024 Hospital Price Transparency Study, covering 4,000+ hospitals and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, found employers and private insurers paid 254% of Medicare for the same services in 2022. Georgia hospitals averaged 345% of Medicare; Michigan, 189%.
CMS's 2021 transparency rule was supposed to fix this. Five years later, only 28 hospitals had ever been fined — while the posted data remained too inconsistent to benchmark. Transparency exposed the variation. It never gave anyone a usable reference rate.
The going rate is a data asset waiting to be built
Contract rates — what hospitals actually pay vendors under GPO and direct agreements — are negotiated in private, tiered by volume, layered with rebates, and benchmarked against no public reference. The organization that aggregates them credibly holds something no single hospital can build alone.
That is what this domain names: the reference rate for hospital purchasing. A benchmark, a data product, a marketplace — whatever the buyer builds, the name says exactly what it is.
