New Jersey's congressman, Frank Pallone Jr., co-authored the federal price transparency bill that passed the House in August, with fines for hospitals that fail to post. This report measures what the hospitals that have posted already show.
The share of 196,545 benchmarkable list prices published by hospitals operating in New Jersey that currently sit above 260% of the corresponding Medicare rate, the line Indiana wrote into law.
New Jersey's hospitals publish, under the federal Hospital Transparency rule, a list price for every service they bill. This report compares those published list prices, across 65 acute-care hospitals in 23 systems, with what Medicare pays for the same procedure at the same site of care in 2026. The threshold is 260% of Medicare, the affordability line Indiana wrote into law for hospital contracts with employers. The instrument is identical to the one used in the first five reports.
Of 196,545 published prices that could be matched to a 2026 Medicare rate, 184,393 sit above the line. That is 93.8%, the second highest share in the series after Texas. The share above 200% of Medicare is 95.8%; the share still above 300% is 91.7%. Excluding extreme prices from the population changes the figure by one tenth of a point. This is the first state in the series measured on a table that contains no corrected prices.
| State | Report | Share of list prices above 260% of Medicare | Benchmarkable prices |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | No. 3 | 94.1% | 263,835 |
| New Jersey | No. 6 | 93.8% | 196,545 |
| Indiana | No. 1 | 90.6% | 119,990 |
| Ohio | No. 2 | 89.9% | 266,262 |
| North Carolina | No. 5 | 85.1% | 158,652 |
| Michigan | No. 4 | 62.8% | 275,013 |
Indiana, Ohio and Michigan were re-measured in September 2026; see the dated correction notes on Reports No. 1 and No. 2. Indiana is shown on an Indiana-only basis.
New Jersey's headline is high, but what sets the state apart is that every hospital is high. By contrast, in North Carolina, individual hospitals ranged from 34.7% to 98.1% of prices above the line. In New Jersey, every one of the 23 systems is above 86%, and the 36 hospitals with at least 2,000 benchmarkable prices range from 86.5% to 99.1%.
The 29 hospitals in Bergen, Hudson, Essex, Passaic, Union, Morris, Sussex, and Warren counties (the New York side of the state) run at 94.7% on 85,237 benchmarkable prices. Central Jersey (19 hospitals, 74,656 prices) and South Jersey (17 hospitals, 36,652 prices) both read 93.1%. The three regions sit within 1.6 points of each other. There is no region of the state where list prices are meaningfully closer to Medicare.
In 2026, Medicare pays $106.81 for a CT scan of the head without contrast (CPT 70450). Every one of the 65 New Jersey hospitals in this report publishes a list price for it.
Lowest published list price: $371.67 at St. Joseph's University Medical Center in Paterson, about 3.5 times Medicare.
Highest published list price: $18,988 at a Capital Health hospital, 177.8 times Medicare. The same hospital's highest negotiated rate with any insurer for this scan, $16,139.80, is itself 151 times Medicare.
A 51-fold spread for the same scan, both ends full-service charges, both published under federal attestation.
For inpatient care, hospitals publish the rates they have negotiated with each insurer for each diagnosis-related group, measured against each hospital's own wage-adjusted Medicare payment. For this report, the payer names behind those rates were read from every New Jersey file (1,294 published payer strings across 55 hospitals, 1.65 million rates).
| Measure (inpatient, MS-DRG, per-hospital wage-adjusted Medicare) | Median, multiple of Medicare | Share above 260% | Hospitals |
|---|---|---|---|
| SCAN, California, negotiated (case rate) | 1.12x | 0.0% | 3 |
| New Jersey, Medicaid managed care contracts (case rate) | 1.08x | 5.2% | 48 |
| New Jersey, Medicare Advantage contracts (case rate) | 1.29x | 2.7% | 31 |
| New Jersey, commercial contracts (case rate) | 2.69x | 52.6% | 53 |
| New Jersey, lowest negotiated rate per DRG, any payer | 0.73x | 0.0% | 55 |
| New Jersey, highest negotiated rate per DRG, any payer | 3.79x | 89.1% | 55 |
The range at a New Jersey hospital, 0.73x at the floor and 3.79x at the ceiling for the same stay, is the distance between what the hospital accepts from a Medicare Advantage or Medicaid plan and what it charges a commercial one. The affordable rate exists at every hospital in the state. It is not available to every payer.
One system in New Jersey publishes an inpatient list price. Of the 59 inpatient hospitals in this report, 53 publish no list (gross) charge for any DRG; they disclose inpatient rates only as negotiated amounts, and four operating acute hospitals publish no inpatient prices at all. The six that publish a list price are all Atlantic Health System hospitals. Among those six, the median inpatient list price is 7.16 times Medicare. That figure describes one system, not the state.
Limits. The New Jersey payer figures are on case rates only, the basis comparable to SCAN's published schedule.
Every hospital in this report has attested under federal rule that its price file is accurate and complete. The files were read as published. Several patterns in them are findings in their own right for anyone relying on the disclosures:
Two facilities are outside the roster: Christ Hospital in Jersey City (which closed in March 2026 and still publishes a file) and Saint Peter's University Hospital (which publishes in an older file format this analysis does not read).
Every hospital in this report has posted and attested. The bill addresses the missing file. This report describes what is inside the files that exist: cash prices copied from the list price, inpatient prices omitted from operating hospitals, and negotiated ranges too wide to inform a patient. All of it is compliant. None of it is transparent.
The State of New Jersey is the largest purchaser of hospital care in the state through its public employee and retiree plans. Indiana wrote the 260% line into law in 2025 as the ceiling for what its largest systems may charge employers. New Jersey's published files place nineteen of every twenty outpatient prices above it.
Instrument. Identical to Reports No. 1 through 5: each published list price compared with the higher of the 2026 Medicare non-facility and facility rates for that code, threshold 260%.
Roster. 65 hospital price files covering 59 Medicare-certified acute hospitals, cross-checked against the CMS Hospital General Information dataset. MS-DRG inpatient rates at 55 hospitals measured against each hospital's own wage-adjusted FY2026 Medicare payment; APR DRG codes excluded by type. Payer classes derived from 1,294 published payer strings on case rates.
Corrections. Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan were re-measured in September 2026 after a data-loader defect was corrected;inpatient figures in Report No. 5 were re-measured after a code-matching defect was corrected. Dated notes appear on Reports No. 1,2,4 and 5.
The Solomon Report is an ongoing public reporting series from Solomon Copilot that measures what public healthcare pricing data actually shows. Hospital prices and Medicare rates are public records. The Report puts them side by side.