Destruction of Skin Lesion Cost in North Carolina
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
North Carolina Medicare physician rate (2026)
-5.6% 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 North Carolina
Check your ZIP code for your region of North Carolina, whether Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham and the Triangle, the Triad, Asheville and the mountains, or Wilmington and the coastal east.
What destruction of skin lesion costs at hospitals near you
Everything above is a national average. The hospital you pick in North Carolina 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 North Carolina the office and hospital physician lines for this CPT differ by $17.46.
National vs North Carolina
Where North Carolina ranks for this CPT
Destruction of Skin Lesion and how North Carolina is priced
North Carolina's Medicare physician pricing comes from one statewide locality with indices just under the national average, so Charlotte, the Research Triangle, and the rural east and mountain west all share the same approved amounts. For a state with several fast-growing metros, the single-locality approach keeps the fee schedule simple even as local economies diverge. Nothing in the geographic adjustments distinguishes a Raleigh procedure from one in Boone or Greenville. As elsewhere, the office-versus-hospital setting decision moves prices more than geography within the state does.
North Carolina is unusually rich in academic medicine, with multiple nationally known university medical centers clustered in the Triangle and Winston-Salem, plus a major hospital system anchored in Charlotte that has grown across the Southeast. The rural east and the mountain counties are much thinner markets, and hospital consolidation has been reshaping who owns local care. Patients near the borders sometimes use Virginia or South Carolina providers.
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 North Carolina
Destruction of Skin Lesion in other states
Destruction of Skin Lesion in North Carolina: questions
North Carolina is a single Medicare locality for this fee schedule. The 2026 physician rate for CPT 17000 is $62.75 in an office and $45.29 in a hospital, statewide. A ZIP lookup still confirms the locality mapping.
Not on the physician fee schedule. North Carolina 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 $13 for the office physician line or $9 for the hospital physician line in North Carolina. Medigap may cover that 20%. This is not the hospital facility fee.
No. $62.75 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. North Carolina ranks #16 of 51 states on the physician line (6% below the national office rate of $66.47).