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Insights and updates on healthcare data, pricing transparency, and industry trends.

The Top Repeated Head-CT Rate Is $119 in One of This Insurer's Networks and $380 in Another. The Ranking Underneath Mostly Holds.

•DeductibleData•13 min read

One insurer publishes fifteen separate home-network price files in a single month. The highest repeated price for a head CT ranges from $119 to $380 across four of them — and the networks don't even rank in the same order from one service to the next. But the providers underneath mostly keep their place: among practices priced individually in two networks whose rates genuinely differ, rank position carries at 0.60 to 0.63 against a null of about zero. The label on the tier is not a portable object. The position is closer to one.

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The Extra Fifteen Minutes Is Worth $34. For One Therapist in Eight, It's Worth $9.

•DeductibleData•12 min read

A 60-minute therapy session pays more than a 45-minute one. In one insurer's Chicago network the usual premium is exactly 1.5x — $34 more per session. But 12.2% of providers are paid almost the same for both, and they aren't underpaid overall: they're paid unusually well for the short session and ordinarily for the long one. Which of the two you are changes what an hour of your time is worth by $37,000 a year.

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Expensive on Scans, Expensive on Visits. Labs Are a Different Contract Entirely.

•DeductibleData•10 min read

We ranked one insurer's providers separately on a scan, an office visit, a physical-therapy session, a joint injection, and a blood test — then asked whether a practice that's expensive on one is expensive on the others. The physician-delivered services move together: rank a provider on its head CT and you've largely ranked it on its office visits, PT, and injections. Labs don't move with any of them. A provider isn't one price position with this payer. It's two. NOTE: this article carries a correction, applied 2026-09-18. Every rank correlation below re-derives exactly and the finding stands; two figures do not — a 0.96 correlation carried over from a related article, and a quartile-stability figure that describes every provider in the file rather than the group this article is about. The correction notice at the top of the page is authoritative.

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Where a Provider Ranks on One Scan Is Where They Rank on All Ten

•DeductibleData•8 min read

In one insurer's published imaging rates for a single state, a provider's price position barely moves from code to code. Rank a provider on a head CT and you have essentially ranked them on their brain MRI, their lumbar X-ray, and seven other scans — across all providers the correlation runs 0.98. A provider's imaging rate isn't ten numbers. It's one position wearing ten price tags. Which is good news and a trap at the same time. NOTE: this article is mid-correction — the headline correlation is confirmed, but the separate on-schedule and off-schedule correlations do not currently re-derive and should not be relied on. The correction notice at the top of the page is authoritative.

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One Insurer Publishes 20 Prices for a Blood Test and About 300 for an Office Visit

•DeductibleData•12 min read

In one insurer's published rate file, a complete blood count carries 20 distinct in-network prices and nearly half of all providers sit on a single rate. A routine office visit in the same file carries about 300, and the most common covers fewer than one provider in ten. The gap tells you something a benchmark can't: which of your rates were negotiated and which were assigned.

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Same Scan, Same City, Same Insurer — One Fee Schedule Pays 4.23× Another

•DeductibleData•12 min read

In one insurer's Nashville-area imaging file, the standard rate for a head CT is either $82 or $346 — and each price is shared, to the cent, by thousands of providers. Four of the five most common imaging schedules sit at or below Medicare; the fifth pays about three times Medicare. The top schedule is exactly 4.23 times the bottom on nine of the ten codes under our top-five cut — and on all ten under a tier rule, at 7.094 times. The number on your contract isn't a negotiated rate. It's a schedule assignment. NOTE: this article carries a correction, applied to the body on 2026-09-17. The 4.23x constant and the schedule rates re-derive exactly on observed rates; one figure (where the typical provider sits against Medicare) was overstated and now reads 0.96x to 1.26x, and mammography's apparent exception was an artifact of our own boundary rather than a property of the schedule.

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