By Jason Nakka
The blue card in your wallet looks like one national insurance company. It is not. It is a federation of independent companies with exclusive territories, and most people will go their whole lives without learning which one they actually have.
So I made a wall of them. Forty-nine Blue Cross Blue Shield entities publish usable rates in June’s federal transparency files. One card each, priced for the same level-4 office visit, sorted cheapest to priciest. You do not need to read a single number to see the finding. The wall just gets darker.
The range: $75.16 at Anthem Kentucky to $231.00 flat at Wyoming’s Blue. Same brand, same fifteen minutes with a doctor, 3.1x apart. On a colonoscopy the family spreads 7.4x.
The obvious objection is geography, of course Wyoming and Kentucky differ. So look inside single states. California has two Blues on this wall, twelve dollars apart. New York has four, spanning $92.40 to $195.35, more than double, inside one state. Pennsylvania has three.
The card does not set the price. The company behind it does, and which company you got was decided by a territory map drawn decades ago, not by anything you chose.
Every figure is from the Blues’ own published Transparency in Coverage files. See what your Blue actually pays at PriceMedic.com.
