How CompMD Works

Hospitals have to post their prices. Most people don't know that.

Since January 2021, every hospital in the U.S. is required by law to publish the prices they've negotiated with insurance companies. It's called the CMS Price Transparency Rule (45 CFR 180). Before this, you had literally no way to know what a hospital would charge until the bill showed up.

The catch: the files are unreadable

Hospitals technically comply by dumping a massive file — usually 200MB to 1.4GB of raw JSON or CSV — somewhere on their website. Good luck opening that in Excel. These files have every procedure, every insurance plan, every negotiated rate. But no normal person is going to wade through millions of rows of data to find out what a knee MRI costs.

That's what CompMD does

We pull these files directly from hospital websites, extract the pricing data, and lay it out so you can compare in seconds. The prices on CompMD are negotiated rates — what the hospital and your insurance company actually agreed to. This isn't the inflated list price. It's the real number.

That said — this is the hospital's total price, not what you pay out of pocket. Your actual cost depends on where you are with your deductible, your coinsurance percentage, and your plan's out-of-pocket max. That's what the estimator tool on each page is for.

How fresh is the data?

Hospitals update these files at least once a year — usually January 1 or July 1. Some update more often. The prices you see on CompMD are refreshed as hospitals post new files. Even if a specific price has shifted by a few percent since the last update, the relative ranking between hospitals stays pretty consistent. The $900 hospital isn't suddenly going to cost more than the $3,000 one.

What we cover right now

120+ hospitals across 20 major U.S. cities, 33 of the most common procedures, and every major insurer in each market. We're adding more cities and procedures all the time.