A knee replacement under the same Blue Cross Blue Shield plan cost about $16,000 at one North Carolina hospital this year and around $40,000 at another, a little more than an hour's drive away.
Those figures come from Serif Health, a San Francisco startup that collects data hospitals and insurers are now required to publish, and were reported in an analysis by KFF Health News. The lower price was at Catawba Valley Medical Center in Hickory. The higher was at Mission Hospital in Asheville, formed by the merger of the region's two largest hospitals.
