Costs of surgical procedures and operations

If you are due to go into hospital to have surgery then you might be interested in how much it costs regardless of whether you are going NHS or private.

In can be hard to find out what your treatment actually costs but I’ve found out that many of the major health insurance companies publish lists of how much they will pay your hospital for your surgery.

As the health insurance companies have special deals with the hospitals the prices they list will be a lot cheaper that it would be if you paid for the surgery yourself, but it will give you an idea of how much your treatment actually costs the hospital.

You can even compare how much each insurer pays for your treatment. This is because a standard classification of procedures has been created by the Clinical Coding and Schedule Development (CCSD) group.

If you know the code of your procedure then you can compare prices using the insurers schedule of fees. However note that some of the schedules just list the surgeon / anaesthetist’s fees, whereas other include the total cost including hospital fees.

You can easily search for your surgery using either the CCSD code or just by typing in the procedure name.

For example W8520 is the code for a type of arthroscopy of the knee. Currently Cigna would pay up to £575 for the surgeon’s fee and £250 for the anaesthetist’s fee. This is a total of £850 for the surgery.

If you paid for this surgery privately then it could cost you around £3000 – but note that this price includes all your hospital fees as well (and of course some profit for the hospital!).

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