Should you compare mammograms costs?

If you're thinking about getting a mammogram in the Chicago-Gary-Kenosha area, you might check carefully, because the cost can vary from $83 to as much as $370, according to a recently released analysis.

The average cost of a mammogram in the Chicago-Gary-Kenosha area was $238, according to the analysis.

Researchers at Castlight Health, a company that helps businesses analyze health care prices, looked at 179 metropolitan areas throughout the country and found that mammogram prices can vary greatly. So, shopping around for women's health care might be worth the effort, with mammograms and other routine services often costing far more in one office than in another.

"The variation was shocking," said Jonathan Rende, chief of research and development for Castlight. "It speaks to how broken the health care system is."

The Castlight study is one of the first to look at price variation in women's health services, and it did not explain what may be causing the disparities or publish the names of providers. However, other studies have identified a host of influences. Private insurers sometimes strike markedly different deals with hospitals, labs and doctors in negotiations that are driven by market power as much as the actual cost of care.

And that leaves health care consumers in the dark. They are in weak positions to shop around as most medical professionals and insurers do not publish prices or make it easy to get quotes. Patients frequently defer to their doctors' recommendations for where to get a test, and those physicians rarely consider price.

Rende said prices of women's health services were particularly important: "We've seen over the years that women are bigger consumers of health care than men in general, and we wanted to drill into some of the more common services and see how those varied."

Not every type of procedure Castlight examined had gigantic variations. The widest price difference for a follow-up visit with an obstetrician and gynecologist was in Phoenix, where the cheapest visit cost $57 and the most expensive one cost $137.

But Castlight found price differences in tests for the human papillomavirus - which is linked to the risk of cervical cancer - of 10 times or more in the majority of the major metropolitan regions it examined. An HPV test in the Philadelphia-Atlantic City, N.J., area ranged from $32 to $626.

Castlight also found prices varied significantly from one region to another beyond what could be attributed to cost-of-living differences. The average HPV test in Indianapolis was $165, five times the $32 price in Charlotte.