Grade A, Best Value

A-grade hospitals score 80 or higher on the HospitalCostData Value Score — a composite that weights below-average prices, strong CMS Hospital Compare quality measures, and lower complication rates. An A grade is informational, not a clinical recommendation: care decisions should always be made with a physician.

These hospitals score 80+ on the HospitalCostData Value Score — a composite that combines below-average Medicare payments with strong CMS Hospital Compare quality measures and lower complication rates. The Value Score is editorial — built on top of public Medicare payment data and CMS Hospital Compare quality measures — and it is a starting reference, not a clinical recommendation. CMS Hospital Compare publishes its own federal star rating that is independent of price.

Average payments in the Grade A cohort runs modestly below the national Medicare payment baseline, about 15% under the national average. Below-average payments often reflect a mix of competitive local markets, lower wage indexes, or a less complex case mix.

Within the cohort, hospital-to-hospital variation reflects regional Medicare wage indexes, case mix, teaching status, and outlier-payment adjustments — the same drivers that move pricing across every CMS DRG. The Grade A hospitals cohort spans 189 hospitals, large enough that averages reflect the segment but small enough that high-volume outliers can move the mean noticeably.

For non-Medicare patients, the more relevant figure than the Medicare average is the negotiated commercial rate or cash-pay rate, published by every hospital under the CMS Hospital Price Transparency Rule.

Average CMS Hospital Compare star rating across the Grade A cohort is 4.8, with 152 hospitals carrying a 5-star rating. CMS publishes the underlying mortality, readmission, safety, infection, and patient-experience domain measures alongside the composite — useful when a Value Score grade does not match expectations from the headline star rating.

For deeper clinical context, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Patient Safety Indicators and Inpatient Quality Indicators feed many of these CMS measures and are useful for comparing acute-care facilities directly.