Hospital Cost Blog

The blog covers planned-procedure cost guides (knee replacement, MRI, ER, childbirth), price-transparency explainers, hospital-bill negotiation walkthroughs, and federal patient-protection coverage like the No Surprises Act. Every article is anchored to public CMS Medicare data with explicit DRG and source references.

Not directly. The headline numbers in our cost guides come from CMS Medicare DRG payment data — what CMS pays the hospital for a Medicare patient. For privately insured readers, the relevant figure is your plan's negotiated network rate, published in each hospital's machine-readable price-transparency file. Uninsured readers should ask the hospital for the cash-pay rate, also disclosed under federal price-transparency rules.

The negotiation guide covers it in depth, but in short: request the itemized bill, audit it for duplicate or upcoded charges, ask for a financial-assistance application (every nonprofit hospital is required to have one), and request the cash-pay rate if the bill is for a non-covered service. The CMS No Surprises Act resource page is the right starting point for surprise out-of-network bills.

No. The blog and the broader site are informational. We surface benchmarks and explain methodology so readers can have better conversations with their physicians, surgeons, billing departments, and insurers. We do not recommend specific hospitals, predict outcomes, or substitute for licensed medical or financial advice.

Three public CMS sources: the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) annual DRG payment files, the CMS Hospital Compare (Care Compare) quality measures, and machine-readable rate files published by hospitals under the federal Hospital Price Transparency Rule. Benchmarks are cross-checked against the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project where applicable.