How to Find Your Hospital’s Price List
The actual cost of anything in a hospital remains a mystery until you receive a bill , but as of January 1, 2019, hospitals must publish a list of all their prices online. It can be confusing, almost unreadable and hard to find, but it is there . Somewhere.
Quartzi searched hospital websites for these listings and posted direct links to 115 of them . They found that the fastest way was to search on Google:
We searched for the name of each hospital, as well as for the terms price list, standard rates, standard rates, and / or chargemaster (and also used alternative spellings / phrases “charge master” or “charge master” ).
Some hospitals didn’t publish them, and phone calls and emails didn’t seem to help. It is not a very well functioning system, but it may be just the beginning.
There is another problem: lists must be “machine readable” so that someone can someday create an application to help you find and compare prices. In the meantime, it is quite difficult for people to read them:
Another caveat: these are not necessarily the prices that you (or your insurance) will pay. Hospitals negotiate prices with each insurance company and they do not always have to tell you the agreed prices, which can be significantly lower than these chargemaster list prices. However, this is a starting point and hopefully someone is working on an easier-to-use version of this information.
Currently, US hospitals are required by law to post prices on the Internet. Good luck finding them . | Quartzy