What does that procedure cost here versus down the road?
A free directory of US hospitals, ambulatory surgery centres, imaging centres and urgent care clinics, with a one to four dollar-sign cost rating for each procedure category, built entirely from the cost reports hospitals file with Medicare.
Start with what you need
Every category ranks hospitals by how hard they mark it up.
How the dollar signs work
Every hospital in America files an audited cost report with Medicare stating, line by line, what a service line cost it to run and what it charged patients for it. The ratio between those two numbers is the markup. We rank each hospital against every other hospital in the country on that markup, one category at a time, and split the field into four equal groups.
Where you go changes what you pay
The same category of care is marked up very differently depending on whether you walk into a small community hospital or a large hospital inside a health system. Across US hospitals, lab work is marked up about 5× at a small hospital and about 9× at a large one.
Compare care settingsReal prices, not just ratings
Hospitals must publish what they charge. We read those files so you do not have to. A dose of anti-nausea medicine runs about $1.85 at a hospital in the cheapest tenth and about $75 in the priciest tenth. An hour of observation runs $29 to $607. Same item, same code.
The self-pay discount nobody advertises. Most hospitals cut their price for patients paying cash, by a median of about 40 percent off list. Some cut nothing at all. We show the number on every hospital page, taken from their own published file.
Where CMS publishes a star rating, it sits next to the cost, because cheapest is not the same as best.
Browse by state
Pick a state to see every rated hospital, surgery centre, imaging centre and urgent care clinic in it.