About TrueHospitalCost

Since 2021, federal law has required every hospital in the United States to publish a machine-readable file of its prices: the list charge, the discounted cash price, and the rates negotiated with insurance plans.

The files are real, and they are public — but they are enormous, technical, and written in chargemaster shorthand. Almost nobody can use them as published.

TrueHospitalCost does one simple job: it turns those files into a search a person in their fifties or sixties can use in ten seconds. Type a procedure and a city, and see the cash price first, every number labeled, dated, and linked back to the hospital's own file so you can verify it.

We publish price data only. We do not give medical advice, recommend hospitals or procedures, or estimate what any individual will be billed. Hospitals covered so far: 10, all part of Saint Luke's (Kansas City area and rural Kansas and Missouri). More are added as their files are checked.