For every procedure below, Medicare publishes a national average total, split into the doctor’s fee and the facility’s fee, separately for an ambulatory surgery center and a hospital outpatient department. In all 9 cases the doctor’s fee is identical in both settings — the entire difference in the total is the building.
These are Medicare’s rates, not cash prices and not commercial negotiated rates. They are the most useful public floor to reason from, because they are the only prices for these procedures that are published nationally, dated, and free to check.
| Procedure | CPT | Surgery center | Hospital outpatient |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cataract Surgery | 66984 | $1,717 | $2,819 |
| Upper Endoscopy (EGD) | 43235 | $607 | $1,036 |
| Knee Arthroscopy | 29881 | $2,159 | $3,857 |
| Gallbladder Removal | 47562 | $3,661 | $6,807 |
| Inguinal Hernia Repair | 49505 | $2,252 | $4,165 |
| Appendectomy | 44970 | $3,608 | $6,754 |
| CT Scan of the Abdomen and Pelvis | 74177 | $492 | $656 |
| Head CT Scan | 70450 | $163 | $212 |
| Chest X-Ray | 71046 | $55 | $121 |
Totals include the doctor fee and the facility fee. Source: Medicare.gov Procedure Price Lookup, retrieved July 29, 2026; national averages based on Medicare’s 2026 payments and copayments.
Every procedure on this list is one where we could read the figure off a dated, named, primary source and check it for internal consistency — the doctor fee matching across both settings, and the doctor fee plus facility fee adding to the published total. Procedures we could not verify that way are not here. We would rather publish nine pages you can check than thirty you cannot.
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