BACKGROUND: Social risk factors are key drivers of the geographic variation in spending in the United States but little is known how community-level social risk factors are associated with hospital prices. Our objective was to describe the relationship between regional hospital-reported prices and social risk factors by price type (chargemaster, cash, commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid).
METHODS: This cross-sectional analysis used newly available hospital-reported prices from acute general hospitals in 2022. The prices were for 14 common services. Prices were winsorized at 98%, wage index-adjusted, standardized by service, and aggregated to hospital service areas (HSAs). For social risk, we used 23 measures across 5 domains of social risk (socioeconomic position; race, ethnicity, and culture; gender; social relationships; and residential and community context). Spearman\'s correlation was used to estimate associations between median prices and social risk by price type.
RESULTS: Prices were reported from 2,386 acute general hospitals in 45% (1,502 of 3,436) HSAs. Correlations between regional prices and other social risk factors varied by price type (range: -0.19 to 0.31). Chargemaster and cash prices were significantly correlated with the most community characteristics (10 of 23, 43%) followed by commercial prices (8, 35%). Medicare and Medicaid prices were only significantly correlated with 1 measure (all p < 0.01). All price types were significantly correlated with the percentage of uninsured (all p < 0.01). Chargemaster, cash, and commercial prices were positively correlated with percentage of Hispanic residents, residents with limited English proficiency, and non-citizens (all p < 0.05).
CONCLUSIONS: While regional correlations between prices and social risk factors were weak across all prices, chargemaster, cash, and commercial prices were more like closely aligned with community-level social risk factors than the two public payers (Medicare and Medicaid). Chargemaster, cash, and commercial hospital prices appeared to be higher in socially disadvantaged communities. Further research is needed to clarify the relationship between prices and community social risk factors.

BACKGROUND: Chargemaster prices are the list prices that providers and health systems assign to each of their medical services in the US. These charges are often several factors of magnitude higher than those extended to individuals with either private or public insurance, however, these list prices are billed in full to uninsured patients, putting them at increased risk of catastrophic health expenditures (CHE). The objective of this study was to examine the risk of CHE across insurance status, diabetes diagnosis and to examine disparity gaps across race/ethnicity.
METHODS: We perform a retrospective observational study on a nationally representative cohort of adult patients from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for the years 2002-2017. Using logistic regression models we estimate the risk of CHE across insurance status, diabetes diagnosis and explore disparity gaps across race/ethnicity.
RESULTS: Our fully adjusted results show that the relative odds of having CHE if uninsured is 5.9 (p < 0.01) compared to if insured, and 1.1 (p < 0.01) for patients with a diabetes diagnosis (compared to those without one). We note significant interactions between insurance status and diabetes diagnosis, with uninsured patients with a diabetes diagnosis being 9.5 times (p < 0.01) more likely to experience CHE than insured patients without a diabetes diagnosis. In terms of racial/ethnic disparities, we find that among the uninsured, non-Hispanic blacks are 13% (p < 0.05), and Hispanics 14.2% (p < 0.05), more likely to experience CHE than non-Hispanic whites. Among uninsured patients with diabetes, we further find that Hispanic patients are 39.3% (p < 0.05) more likely to have CHE than non-Hispanic white patients.
CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate that uninsured patients with diabetes are at significantly elevated risks for CHE. These risks are further found to be disproportionately higher among uninsured racial/ethnic minorities, suggesting that CHE may present a channel through which structural economic and health disparities are perpetuated.