Hidden Hospital Costs Leave Some Patients With Sticker Shock

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Can you imagine paying $15 for one Tylenol, $8 for a tissue or $50 for a tongue depressor?

If a store charged those prices, you'd probably find somewhere else to shop. But as CBS2's Dr. Max Gomez reported, those are actual hidden hospital fees.

"Seventeen thousand dollars is roughly what you would pay for a decent used car," Ryan Edgerton said.

It's also the cost of a handful of stitches and a tetanus shot at Bayonne Medical Center, according to a medical bill he received.

His sticker shock is not all that uncommon.

Baer Hanusz-Rajkowski was equally shocked by a bill from Bayonne for a cut to his finger that didn't require any stitches at all.

"Nine thousand dollars is a lot to eat for a band-aid," he said.

"That's why we are in the crisis that we are in with health care," said Pat Palmer, who runs a company that negotiates health care costs on behalf of patients.

She said she's seen it all.

"Fifty-three thousand for the trauma team that never performed one thing," Palmer said.

You might recall hearing about the $39 "skin to skin" fee for a nurse to hand a newborn to his mother at a Utah hospital. Palmer said that's just another way to pad a patient's bill.

She also takes issue with the wording of some hospital bills. For example, would you know what a "mucus recovery system" is?

"That would be a box of Kleenex," Palmer said.

Martin Gaynor, an economist who specializes in health care costs, said hospitals, just like any other business, need to turn a profit to pay for overhead like salaries, equipment and regulatory compliance.

"Hospitals live and die on sales revenues," he said. "The total charges, which are like a sticker price on a car, that's what the hospital asks but not what they actually get paid."

Gaynor said typically insurance companies will negotiate with hospitals over these "list prices" or "aspirational charges," as they're called.

"They get paid what are often called allowed amounts," he said. "Usually a fraction of the charges."

Additionally, a spokesperson for Carepoint Health System, which oversees Bayonne Medical Center, told CBS2 that when hospitals have a lot of uninsured or under-insured patients, some costs shift to the private payers.

At the end of the day, both Edgerton and Hanusz-Rajkowski were billed less than $1,000 out of pocket for their care, but still say it was too much.