Common questions
Is this my actual price?
No, and this is the most important thing to understand. A dollar rating shows how much a facility marks a category of care up over what it told Medicare that care costs it. What you pay depends on your insurance contract, your deductible and your case. Use the rating to decide where to ask for a real estimate.
Where does the data come from?
Two public-domain federal datasets: CMS Healthcare Cost Report Information System (HCRIS) cost reports, which every hospital billing Medicare must file, and the NPPES national provider registry. No paid sources, no scraping.
Why is a surgery centre not rated?
Ambulatory surgery centres do not file Medicare cost reports, so there is no audited cost-to-charge figure for them. Rather than invent a number we leave them unrated. They are usually the cheaper setting for outpatient work, which is why they are still listed.
Why do you not show a dollar amount?
Because we would have to guess. Charges are not prices, and the number you would actually be billed depends on a negotiated contract we cannot see. Publishing a fake precise number would be worse than publishing an honest relative one.
Does a cheap rating mean better care?
No. Cost and quality are separate. Nothing on this site is a quality measure, and you should not choose a hospital on price alone.
Why is a hospital missing or wrong?
Coverage is limited to facilities in the federal filings, and those filings contain errors and lag reality. Email krishan@thinkscoopinc.com and we will look.
Are the cash prices real prices?
Yes. Those come from the machine-readable files hospitals are federally required to publish, and they are what the hospital lists for a patient paying cash. They are not what an insurer pays and not necessarily what you would be quoted, but unlike the dollar ratings they are actual dollars from the hospital's own file.
What is the self-pay discount?
The gap between a hospital's cash price and its list price for the same item, taken as a median across everything it publishes. The typical hospital knocks about 40 percent off. Some knock off nothing. If you are uninsured, this is the most useful number on the page, and it is worth asking about before treatment.
Why is quality data retrieved from the Internet Archive?
The CMS server that publishes Care Compare blocks our network. The Internet Archive holds an unmodified mirror of the same public-domain files, so we read it from there and label the capture date on the method page. It is real CMS data, but it is a snapshot rather than a live feed, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
Why do some hospitals show no star rating?
Because CMS does not publish one for them. Roughly half of US hospitals are unrated by CMS, usually because they are too small or too specialised for the measures to apply. We leave the field blank rather than guess.
Can I use this data?
Yes. The underlying federal data is public domain and our derived ratings are free to reuse with attribution. Everything is served as static JSON, documented on the data page.
How current is it?
Hospital financials come from the FY2024 HCRIS file, the most recent complete national set. The facility registry is the August 2026 NPPES release.