Just to clarify, of the $60,000 associated with the cost of cochlear implant surgery, less than 5 % of that goes to the surgeon. The vast majority of the amount paid for cochlear implantation goes to the the facility for use of the operating room, supplies, device, and anasthesiologist.
Medicare reimburses the surgeons around $1500 for CI surgery (no, I didn't drop a zero, that's one thousand five hundred), Medicaid is even worse -- I just found a Montana Medicaid reimbursement list for 2007 that says that surgeons receive $1000.44 for CI surgery. It's even worse for simultaneous bilaterals, the second side is automatically discounted by 50 %, so the surgeon does 2X the surgery and gets 1.5X the fees. If you want to google this up for yourself, the code is 69930 -- and if you see a reimbursement level for this code of over $20,000 I just about guarantee that the fine print it will say that level of reimbursement includes the cost of the device.
Most private insurers limit their reimbursements to between 125 and 150 % of Medicare (i.e. a maximum of $2250). The amount actually paid depends on the region, areas with lower costs of living (like Charlotte) get slightly less than average, expensive areas like San Francisco get slightly more. Given the significant costs of maintaining a medical office with support staff and malpractice insurance, plus the fact that the fee includes pre-op appointments, post op appointments and the actual surgery time, cochlear implant surgery is not the money making machine that some people seem to think it is.
