Here's why hospitals set high prices

"The most expensive hospital in America is not set amid the swaying palm trees of Beverly Hills or the luxury townhouses of New York's Upper East Side," Julie Creswell, Barry Meier and Jo Craven McGinty wrote last week in the New York Times. "It is in a faded blue-collar town 11 miles from Midtown Manhattan." Bayonne Hopsital Center in Northern New Jersey tends to charge higher prices than any other hospital in the country, according to the new data trove that Medicare made public earlier this month. For example, while the average hospital charges $23,518 to treat congestive heart failure, Bayonne charges $121,080.