About Clear Hospital Costs
Who We Are
Clear Hospital Costs is operated by Peter Griffiths. We built this site because hospital pricing in the United States is unnecessarily opaque, and the data to fix that is already public. It just needs to be made accessible.
Since 2021, every US hospital has been required by federal law to publish their prices in machine-readable files. As of April 2026, the CMS has strengthened enforcement with significant financial penalties. The data is there. The challenge is that these files are enormous (sometimes hundreds of megabytes), formatted for machines rather than people, and scattered across thousands of hospital websites.
We solve that by downloading these files, extracting pricing for common procedures, and presenting the data in a format you can actually use to compare costs across hospitals and insurance plans.
Why This Exists
Healthcare pricing in the US has historically been a black box. Patients often receive bills they could not have predicted, and the same procedure at the same hospital can cost wildly different amounts depending on your insurance plan.
The CMS Price Transparency Rule changed that by requiring hospitals to publish their prices, including negotiated rates with specific insurance plans. This data shows, for example, that a brain MRI at one Houston hospital costs $239.69 through Medicare but $1,691.87 through a commercial BCBS plan. The same MRI, the same hospital, a 7x difference.
We believe this information should be easy to find and understand. That is what this site does.
Editorial Policy
We source data from CMS-mandated hospital pricing files and present it without editorial modification. We do not accept payment from hospitals to alter or remove pricing data. We do not accept payment for placement or ranking in any comparison.
Our data processing is transparent:
- We display prices exactly as published by the hospitals
- We link directly to the hospital's source file so you can verify the data
- We show when the hospital last updated their file and when we last accessed it
- We do not editorialise. We present data, not opinions on whether prices are "too high" or "too low"
For full details on how we source and process data, see our Methodology page.
We are also committed to making this data accessible to all users. See our Accessibility Statement.
Independence
We are not affiliated with any hospital, healthcare provider, insurance company, or government agency. We are an independent publisher presenting publicly available data in a consumer-friendly format.
We fund this site through display advertising. No hospital, insurer, or healthcare company has any influence over the data we display or how we present it.
Contact
We welcome feedback, corrections, and questions. Reach us at hello@clearhospitalcosts.com or visit our Contact page.