Healthcare Price Transparency: Why Costs Still Vary 10× for the Same Procedure

Hospital price transparency data shows the same medical procedure can cost up to 10× more across facilities. Openbook Health analyzes real data from Florida hospitals to reveal why transparency hasn’t yet translated into savings—and how employers can finally act on it.

The 10× Problem in American Healthcare

When we analyzed hospital price transparency data across Florida, one pattern stood out - the same medical procedure can cost five to ten times more, depending on where it’s performed.

Same CPT code. Same city. Sometimes, even the same hospital system.

Despite federal mandates for hospitals and insurers to publish their negotiated rates, the promise of transparency remains far from reality. The data exists - but it’s unusable to those who need it most: employers, brokers, and patients.

Price Transparency in Healthcare: What the Data Reveals

Using publicly available hospital pricing data files, Openbook Health uncovered striking cost disparities across hundreds of common procedures:

• MRI of the brain (without contrast): $543 to $4,270 — a 7.9× difference.

• CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis: $692 to $5,900 — 8.5× difference.

• Colonoscopy: $2,675 to $7,431 — nearly 3× difference.

• C-section delivery: $6,450 to $19,800 — 3.1× difference.

These aren’t outliers. They’re systemic symptoms of how hospital contracts are structured, negotiated, and renewed in a system that rewards opacity over efficiency.

The Illusion of Transparency

Technically, hospitals and insurers comply with healthcare transparency laws - they publish the data.

But the files are massive (hundreds of gigabytes), inconsistently formatted, and incomprehensible to most analysts, let alone consumers.

What was intended as a tool for accountability has turned into a fog of compliance, where visibility is buried beneath complexity.

Transparency without usability is just noise.

How Employers Pay the Price

Employer-sponsored health plans represent more than $1.3 trillion in annual spending -yet most CFOs can’t answer a simple question:

“What are we really paying for an MRI, a colonoscopy, or a C-section?”

When the same procedure costs 3× to 10× more across in-network providers, employers unknowingly subsidize inefficiency.

If a 2,000-employee company redirected just 20% of high-variance procedures to lower-cost, high-quality facilities, annual savings could exceed $500,000 to $1 million—without cutting benefits or access.

That’s the hidden tax of opacity - and the opportunity that price transparency was meant to unlock.

Transparency Is Just the Beginning

At Openbook Health, we go beyond compliance.

Our platform turns raw price transparency files into clear, actionable insights that employers, brokers, and union leaders can use to design smarter benefits and negotiate with data, not guesswork.

We normalize and benchmark prices across payers, procedures, and facilities, overlaying quality and utilization signals to highlight where real value lies.

Because you can’t manage what you can’t see - and you can’t change what you don’t understand.

From Opacity to Opportunity

Healthcare doesn’t need another black box. It needs a shared language of value - built on truth, clarity, and trust.

Price transparency is the foundation.

Usability is the revolution.

Join the Movement

If you’re a benefits consultant, broker, or employer ready to turn price transparency into a competitive advantage, explore what’s possible with Openbook Health.

Together, we can turn healthcare’s most confusing system into something it was never designed to be:

clear, fair, and navigable.