Methodology
Every price on Truepenny traces to a specific file a hospital or insurer was required by federal law to publish. This page explains where the numbers come from, how we clean them, and when we refuse to publish one.
Where the numbers come from
Since January 2021, the federal Hospital Price Transparency rule (45 CFR §180) has required every U.S. hospital to publish a machine-readable file of its standard charges: the gross (chargemaster) price, the discounted cash price, and the specific rate it has negotiated with each insurance plan, for every billable item. We download these files directly from each hospital's own website — never from aggregators — and parse the current CMS v3.0.0 format in its JSON and CSV variants.
Right now that is 296 hospitals, 43 procedures, and 832,198 rate rows behind the pages on this site. Files were retrieved 2026-07-26 → 2026-08-15; every page shows the dates for the files it uses.
Where a page shows independent imaging or outpatient centers, those rates come from the insurers' own federally required Transparency in Coverage files — the payer-side counterpart to the hospital rule. We label those modules with the payers and file dates they came from.
What we publish
Hospitals may express a negotiated rate as a dollar amount, a percentage, or an algorithm. We publish dollar-denominated rates and never show you a bare percentage. Where hospitals publish the 2026 paid-amount fields — the median, 10th and 90th percentile amounts insurers actually paid, with claim counts — we capture those too.
"Commercial median" on our pages is the median dollar rate negotiated by commercial insurers at that hospital for that procedure, after cleaning. Medicare Advantage, Medicaid managed-care, TRICARE, and similar public-program plans are excluded from that median — they price differently and would drag it away from what a commercially insured patient's plan pays.
Procedure names are our own plain-English descriptions. The billing codes (CPT/HCPCS/DRG) are shown for the record; we do not reproduce the AMA's official code descriptors.
Cleaning rules
Raw rows are never edited or deleted — cleaning marks rows, and pages are computed only from rows that survive. The rules:
- Negotiated rates under $15 are treated as junk (placeholder and per-unit artifacts) and excluded.
- Rates above 25× the median for that billing code are flagged as outliers.
- The same code often appears on multiple chargemaster lines; we deduplicate to one canonical row per hospital, payer, plan, and code.
- Payer names are kept verbatim and separately normalized ("Blue Shield-Ballard" → Regence). Third-party administrators and union trusts that can't be confidently mapped stay unmapped — they are excluded from per-insurer figures but still count in overall medians.
When we don't publish a number
A hospital file sometimes carries a negotiated rate for a service the hospital doesn't actually perform — a professional fee schedule inherited from a contract grid. Publishing those would be worse than useless, so each procedure-hospital cell must show evidence before it renders: in-file evidence (a chargemaster price, cash price, or paid-claims data for that code) or external evidence (Medicare claims volume for the procedure's DRG, or CMS quality-measure reporting — e.g. whether the hospital reports inpatient deliveries at all). Cells that fail are suppressed — 33 are currently held back this way — and borderline cells are flagged for human review before each release.
Hospitals that negotiate as one system show similar rates, and we group them; the grouping is a hint, not a guarantee — the same system can hold different contracts in different regions.
Provenance
Every rate row references the exact source file it came from: URL, the hospital's own in-file date, our retrieval date, and a checksum. The mono SOURCE: line on every price block renders from that record, and facility pages link the hospital's original file so you can check us.
Limits
Every price here is an estimate. Your cost depends on your plan, your deductible and out-of-pocket position, and the services actually performed during your visit — a facility fee shown here may not include the physician's fee. Hospital files also contain errors, and a published rate is not a quote. Always confirm with the provider before scheduling.