An Ohio woman scheduled for a minor gynecological procedure was told the day before that her doctor could no longer perform it in his office. A hospital system had bought the practice the previous year and required the procedure to be done at a freestanding surgery center it also owned. Her estimate went from about $3,000 to roughly $6,000.
Her experience, reported by KFF Health News, is not a billing error. It is the predictable result of an ownership pattern reshaping American medicine, arriving as larger bills for care that looks unchanged. Where a procedure happens now often depends on who owns the practice, and that determines what it costs.
