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It's a known fact different hospitals offer a variety of prices for medical procedures, but now a new study released Monday makes that even clearer.

Researchers conducted a "secret shopper" study in search of a total hip replacement at two randomly-selected hospitals from each state and Washington D.C., in addition to 20 of the top orthopedic hospitals in the country.

With all the quotes collected, it was alarming to find that the prices for the same procedure can range from $11,100 to almost $126,000 depending on which hospital you chose. However, many hospitals that were randomly selected for the study did not even offer the researchers a price quote.

"There have been many initiatives to increase pricing transparency, including state and federal laws, and still many hospitals are unable to provide price information for a common procedure," study author Jaime Rosenthal, a researcher at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City, said in a press release.

"Also, the variation in pricing was striking, as we tried to give each hospital identical information in terms of what the procedure would require."

For the study, Rosenthal would call the hospital and pretended to have a 62-year-old grandmother who needed a hip replaced but didn't have insurance, and asked for the total price of the procedure.

Just 45 percent of the top 20 hospitals and 10 percent of other hospitals could provide a complete cost for the hospital and doctor fees for a hip replacement, after up to five phone calls.

"We don't know if we would have gotten the same findings if we looked at other procedures," said Peter Cram, M.D. "As a researcher I suspect the results would have been quite similar."

"This took a lot of phone calls and a lot of persistence, and it wasn't easy to get the prices out of these hospitals and when they did the variation was huge," Cram said.

The information suggests an overwhelming lack of transparency in America's hospitals. It also gives evidence that there is an advantage to shopping around, according to Cram.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 327,000 Americans had a hip replaced in 2009.