The Healthcare Price Chaos Index
How irrational is American healthcare pricing? We scored every major procedure.
We scored 2,328 procedures on pricing irrationality. The most chaotic procedures show price swings of 500%+ between states for identical services. This is not driven by cost differences — it is a market failure.
If healthcare pricing were rational, the same procedure would cost roughly the same everywhere. A knee MRI in Mississippi shouldn't cost 5x what it costs in Maryland. But it does — and worse.
We created the Chaos Score by combining each procedure's coefficient of variation (how spread out prices are), the ratio between the cheapest and most expensive state, and the absolute price range. A score of 100 means maximum pricing chaos — the cost is essentially random depending on where you live.
The results are damning. Many common procedures have chaos scores above 60, meaning there's effectively no rational pricing mechanism at work. You're not paying for quality differences. You're paying a geographic lottery tax.