01 / ContextThe question
behind the work.
Hospitals can submit very different charges for comparable inpatient services, and charge figures alone are difficult to interpret without a common payment benchmark and market context.
My role
I prepared the 2023 CMS inpatient data, constructed DRG-level charge and Medicare-payment comparisons, analyzed state and regional variation, modeled relationships, and produced the self-contained report.
03 / In detailComparing like with like
I used 2023 CMS inpatient pricing data to focus the analysis on comparable services rather than mixing unrelated procedures. The report centers on a high-volume DRG and uses Medicare payment as a common benchmark for comparing submitted hospital charges across hospitals, states, and regions.
The workflow calculates percentile spread, charge-to-payment ratios, state medians, regional medians, and market context so a reader can separate a general price level from an unusually wide benchmark gap.
What the price spread showed
For the focal service, submitted charges ranged from about $30,936 at the 10th percentile to $133,639 at the 90th percentile. State medians ranged from about $24,611 in Maryland to $148,155 in Nevada.
The strongest payment disconnect appeared in the West, where median submitted charges were about 5.1 times median Medicare payment for the same DRG. Metropolitan hospitals also tended to post materially higher charges than small-town and rural hospitals.
A benchmarking report for the next conversation
I packaged the work as a self-contained HTML report with service-level dispersion, regional comparisons, state views, and charge-versus-payment charts. The sequence starts with the comparable service, then moves into geography and the gap between list prices and the payment benchmark.
The result gives a hospital or market analyst a sharper question to investigate: where does the organization's pricing posture sit against true peers, and what part of the gap comes from market structure rather than the service itself?