Ear & Upper Respiratory Infections Cost in Iowa — Compare All Hospitals

Iowa hospitals price ear & upper respiratory infections (Medicare DRG 152) anywhere from $7,810 to $31,700 — a $23,890 gap between the cheapest and most expensive option. The cheapest is Montgomery County Memorial Hospital + Clinics in Red Oak; the most expensive is Mercy Medical Center Cedar Rapids (Acute Care) in Cedar Rapids. The state average sits at $14,784.

Gross charges are list prices, not what most patients pay. Insurance plans negotiate substantial discounts, Medicare and Medicaid pay fixed federal rates, and uninsured patients can usually qualify for a cash-pay discount. But the gross charge still works as a useful benchmark: a hospital that lists ear & upper respiratory infections at twice the price of another typically negotiates higher rates with insurers too, and quotes more for uninsured patients.

You usually don't choose a hospital during an urgent ear & upper respiratory infections admission. This page is for the planning side: patients with chronic conditions weighing their options, caregivers picking ahead of time, or employers comparing in-network facilities. Click any hospital name for its full quality profile — CMS overall star rating, mortality and readmission rates, patient-experience scores. When two nearby hospitals look similar on quality, the one with lower published charges is the safer default for routine medical admissions.

Pricing comes from each hospital's Machine-Readable File (MRF), published under the federal Hospital Price Transparency Rule. Iowa hospitals missing from the list either don't perform ear & upper respiratory infections in volume, haven't published a usable price for DRG 152 in their most recent MRF, or fell below our data-quality thresholds (we filter out clearly erroneous entries like $0 charges). The list refreshes as hospitals update their files.