Methodology

The source of every price

Since 2021, US hospitals must publish a machine-readable file of their standard charges under 45 CFR 180. PricedCare reads those files directly from each hospital. We do not use prices from insurers, aggregators or surveys.

Which procedures we read

We read a fixed list of 69 shoppable procedures, identified by their billing codes. The procedure names on the site are our own plain-English wording. We match a code only when the hospital's file lists that exact code. If a hospital does not list it, the page says the code is not in the file.

The three price types

• Cash price: the self-pay price the file lists for patients without insurance. Where a hospital lists several cash lines, we show the lowest and say how many.
• Negotiated rate: the rates the file lists per insurer or plan. We show the lowest and highest rate in the file. These are what insurers pay, not what you pay.
• List price: the gross charge the file lists. It is the starting figure before any discount.

What we do not do

We do not estimate, average across hospitals we have no data for, model prices, or fill gaps. We do not adjust for location, insurance or the services a price includes. A figure appears only if it is in the file.

Which file belongs to which hospital

A hospital system often publishes one file that covers several locations. We assign a file to a hospital only when its listed national provider identifiers or its name match the hospital. Files that match no hospital do not produce prices on our site.

When a comparison is published

A procedure in a metro area gets its own comparison page only when at least three hospitals in that metro list a cash price for it. Below that, the page is not published and is left out of search engines.

Dates and freshness

Every price shows the month the hospital's file was published, taken from the file itself. Files older than the current period are marked as older. We check hospital lists monthly and download the files nightly.

Known limits

• Some files are in layouts we cannot read. They are marked as unsupported and produce no prices.
• Some hospitals block automated downloads. We do not get around that protection. Those hospitals are marked as blocked.
• Some hospitals have not published a file, or we have not yet found their file. Those hospitals are listed as not publishing.
• A file can be wrong or out of date. If you find an error, see corrections.

The sources we use are listed on data sources.