Destruction of Skin Lesion Cost in Alabama
Destruct premalg lesion
$253Hospital outpatient total2026 Medicare, physician + facility- ✓Your ZIP's wage-adjusted hospital and surgery centre rates
- ✓Five nearby hospitals by name, with CMS star ratings
- ✓The add-on codes that typically land on the bill
- ✓A word-for-word script for asking for a good-faith estimate
- ✓A private link you can reopen and share
- ✓Everything in the Premium report
- ✓15 nearby hospitals instead of five
- ✓Filled good-faith-estimate request letter
- ✓Bill-negotiation letter
- ✓Printable PDF download
Alabama Medicare physician rate (2026)
-9.7% vs nationalSingle statewide locality.
What the whole procedure costs
The rate above is the physician’s fee on its own. The facility bills separately, and for most procedures the facility is the larger half of the bill. These are 2026 national Medicare amounts.
Medicare may pay the facility separately for this code or package it into another service on the same day, so treat the facility share as an upper bound. Medicare allowed amounts are not what an uninsured patient is charged, and not a quote. Private plans typically allow more.
Your ZIP in Alabama
Enter a ZIP code to see figures for your part of Alabama, whether that is Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile, Montgomery, or a rural county in the Black Belt or the Appalachian north.
What destruction of skin lesion costs at hospitals near you
Everything above is a national average. The hospital you pick in Alabama moves the bill more than anything else you control.
Rates for your ZIP, 5 named hospitals with CMS ratings, the add-on codes, and the scheduler script.
One-off payment, no account and no subscription. You get a private link and an email. No medical records and no insurance card, ever.
What these numbers are
Every figure on this page is a 2026 Medicare allowed amount: the physician line comes from the Physician Fee Schedule adjusted by geographic practice-cost indices, and the facility totals come from the CMS hospital outpatient (OPPS) and ambulatory surgery centre rates. None of them is a hospital chargemaster price, your insurer's contracted rate, or a quote. Anesthesia, pathology, imaging reads and follow-up care are billed under their own codes when they apply, and an inpatient stay is paid a different way again. In Alabama the office and hospital physician lines for this CPT differ by $16.36.
National vs Alabama
Where Alabama ranks for this CPT
Destruction of Skin Lesion and how Alabama is priced
Medicare treats Alabama as one statewide payment locality, so the same geographic adjustment factors apply to a physician visit in Birmingham as in a small Wiregrass town. That single-locality setup keeps the published fee schedule uniform across the state, even though the cost of running a practice differs between the larger metros and rural counties. Alabama's geographic indices sit below the national average, which places its Medicare-approved amounts among the lower tiers nationally. What varies for patients is less the fee schedule itself and more the setting where care is delivered, since hospital outpatient billing can add facility fees on top of the physician rate.
Birmingham anchors the state's medical economy with a major academic medical center and a concentration of specialists, while Huntsville, Mobile, and Montgomery support sizable regional systems. Much of rural Alabama, particularly the Black Belt counties, faces thin physician coverage, so patients there often travel to a metro for specialty care. That travel pattern means the price you compare should be for where you will actually be treated, not just where you live.
This procedure: This is the destruction, most often by liquid nitrogen freezing, of a single precancerous skin lesion such as an actinic keratosis, the rough scaly patch caused by years of sun exposure. The dermatologist sprays or dabs the lesion for a few seconds; it stings briefly, blisters or crusts over a few days, and then peels away. No anesthesia or downtime is needed, and the whole treatment adds only moments to a skin exam.
What Is Destruction of Skin Lesion?
This is the destruction, most often by liquid nitrogen freezing, of a single precancerous skin lesion such as an actinic keratosis, the rough scaly patch caused by years of sun exposure. The dermatologist sprays or dabs the lesion for a few seconds; it stings briefly, blisters or crusts over a few days, and then peels away. No anesthesia or downtime is needed, and the whole treatment adds only moments to a skin exam.
What Affects the Cost
- –The code covers only the first lesion; every additional lesion frozen at the same visit is billed under add-on code 17003, and 15 or more lesions switch to code 17004.
- –Many patients need re-treatment at future visits because actinic keratoses recur, so annual cost is a multiple of one session.
- –An office visit charge is often billed alongside the freezing when the clinician also performs a skin exam or addresses other concerns.
- –Alternative treatments for widespread lesions, such as prescription field creams or photodynamic therapy, carry very different price tags worth comparing.
- –Freezing a benign spot like a plain seborrheic keratosis for appearance reasons is usually coded differently and may not be covered at all.
Questions to Ask Before Booking
- 1.How many lesions will you treat today, and what is the charge for each additional one?
- 2.Are any of the spots you plan to freeze considered cosmetic rather than precancerous?
- 3.Will today also be billed as an office visit on top of the freezing?
- 4.If I have many lesions, would a prescription cream or field treatment be more cost-effective than repeated freezing?
- 5.How often should I expect to come back for re-treatment, and what does a typical year of visits cost?
Other featured procedures in Alabama
Destruction of Skin Lesion in other states
Destruction of Skin Lesion in Alabama: questions
Alabama is a single Medicare locality for this fee schedule. The 2026 physician rate for CPT 17000 is $60.00 in an office and $43.64 in a hospital, statewide. A ZIP lookup still confirms the locality mapping.
Not on the physician fee schedule. Alabama uses one locality, so the Medicare physician rate is the same from one end of the state to the other. What still changes is site of service (office vs hospital) and any facility fee the hospital bills on its own claim.
After the Part B deductible, coinsurance is usually 20% of the allowed amount: about $12 for the office physician line or $9 for the hospital physician line in Alabama. Medigap may cover that 20%. This is not the hospital facility fee.
No. $60.00 is only the physician's share. Adding Medicare's facility payment brings the total to about $253 in a hospital outpatient department. Anesthesia, pathology and other codes billed the same day are extra. Alabama ranks #3 of 51 states on the physician line (10% below the national office rate of $66.47).