How this works
Every hospital publishes its prices. Almost nobody can read them.
Federal rules have required it since 2021. The files are real, public — and enormous. One hospital here publishes a single file of 9,453,846 rows. We read all of them and pull out the 58 procedures people actually shop for.
Hospitals have to publish a machine-readable file listing what they charge — the list price, the price for people paying for themselves, and the rates they have negotiated with insurers. They also have to advertise where that file lives, at a fixed address on their own website. That last part is what makes this possible to do at all: finding the files is a script, not a research project.
What we do to the numbers
nothing, with two exceptionsBoth exceptions exist for the same reason: to stop this site printing a figure it cannot defend.
A percentage is not a price
A hospital may express a negotiated rate as a percentage of the charge rather than a dollar amount. Those rows are real, but they cannot be compared or added up. 705 of them were left out of the ranges here and counted separately on each hospital's page.
One rate attached to everything is not a price for anything
Some hospitals attach the same dollar figure to nearly their whole price list. At one hospital here it is the published minimum for 47 of the 50 procedures we found — a colonoscopy, a mammogram and a brain MRI all at once. That is a contract term, not the price of any one procedure, so we show the lowest and highest procedure-specific rate instead.
One hospital here publishes none at all
Ohio State University Hospitals publishes the discounted-cash column the rule requires, and it is empty across every one of the 2,366,510 rows in its file. A patient paying out of pocket — the person the rule was written for — cannot learn their price from it. We publish that, because it is the most useful thing we know about that hospital.
What these prices do not cover
Hospital files cover facility charges — the hospital's own bill. The clinician who reads your scan or performs your procedure usually bills separately, and that fee is not in any hospital's file. It is why office visits and EKGs show here as "billed by the doctor" rather than as missing data.
A published price is also not a quote. What you are billed depends on what is actually done. Use these to know what to ask for and roughly what to expect, then call the hospital and ask for the self-pay price by name.
Why some prices show a range
A hospital can list the same procedure code at several different prices — one here lists seven for a single joint injection — and its file does not say which one applies to you. Where that happens we show the range and mark it, rather than picking one and calling it the price.
For the same reason we only compare hospitals on imaging and lab tests. A surgical code can mean one operating-room line at one hospital and an entire admission at another, so a "cheapest" across them would be meaningless.
Prices are re-read from each hospital's published file roughly monthly. Every hospital page names the exact file, the date we read it, and how many rows we scanned to produce its numbers. Last full pass covered 35,154,094 rows across 10 hospitals.