Hospital prices vs. what insurers pay

How we did this

Source. Each hospital's own machine-readable standard charges file, which federal rules (45 CFR § 180) require it to publish and keep current. We used only files found through the hospital's official index (its cms-hpt.txt file) and confirmed to describe that hospital, and only files we could read in full. The hospitals dated these files between January 19, 2025 and September 30, 2026; each hospital's page shows its own date and links to its file.

What counts as an insurer rate. Only per-service dollar rates under a fee schedule. Case rates, per diems and percentage-of-charges arrangements cover a whole visit or stay, so they are excluded rather than mistaken for the price of one service. A hospital's insurer figure for a service needs at least 3 insurers behind it, and a service appears here only when at least 25 hospitals publish one.

Checks. Values that cannot be real prices for the service (such as a $1 emergency visit) are dropped by comparing each one against national Medicare reference rates. Surgeries are left out of the comparison above, because insurer rates for a surgery usually cover the whole operation while the list price on the same code is often one line of it.

Limits. These 482 hospitals are the ones whose current files we could read and check, not a random sample of US hospitals. Insurer rates are what hospitals publish as negotiated, not claims paid, and none of these figures include separate physician bills. Data read October 1, 2026.