Healthcare Pricing IsBroken by Design

You can comparison shop for almost anything—except the thing that can bankrupt you. Insurers negotiate rates behind closed doors, and the opacity isn't a bug. It's the business model.

Explore the Data

The Problem

Try to find out what an MRI costs before you get one. Call your insurer, call the hospital, and you'll get a different number from each—if you get a number at all. The price depends on who your employer is, which plan you picked, and which facility you walk into. The same scan, same machine, same technician. Wildly different prices.

This isn't an accident. Insurers negotiate rates with every provider individually, and those rates are kept confidential. A hospital might charge one insurer $800 for a procedure and another $3,200. Neither you nor your employer sees the spread. You just get the bill.

Knee MRI — CPT 70553
Same procedure. Same city. Different price.
Walk-in Clinic
$425
Community Health
$780
In-Network Lab
$1,250
Regional Hospital
$2,100
University Medical
$3,400
Out-of-Network
$4,800
11.3x price difference — same scan

When buyers can't see prices, sellers set them. When intermediaries control information, they capture value. The entire system runs on the fact that you don't know what things cost until it's too late to choose differently.

This opacity isn't a flaw in the system. It is the system.

The Transparency Rule

In 2022, the federal Transparency in Coverage rule went into effect. For the first time, health insurers are required to publish machine-readable files containing every negotiated rate for every covered item and service. Every insurer. Every provider. Every price.

On paper, this is revolutionary. In practice, the files are designed to be technically compliant and practically useless. A single insurer can publish tens of thousands of files, each hundreds of gigabytes. The formats vary. The data quality is inconsistent. No regular person—and few institutions—can make sense of it.

The rule forced the data into the open. But “public” and “accessible” are very different things.

Same Question. Different Universe.

“What does a knee MRI cost me?”

Anywhere else
4 results near you · Sort: Price ↓
Valley Imaging Center
2.3 mi · In-network
$425
Metro Radiology
4.1 mi · In-network
$580
City Medical Center
1.8 mi · In-network
$710
University Hospital
5.2 mi · In-network
$890
✓ 4 results in 0.3 seconds
Healthcare
Searching 47,000 machine-readable files...
Downloading in-network-rates-2024-01.json (247 GB)...
{"negotiation_arrangement":"ffs","name":"","billing_code_type":"CPT","billing_code":"70553","negotiated_rates":[{"negotiated_prices":[{
⚠ Schema mismatch: expected "provider_reference", got "provider_group_id"
"negotiated_rate":3247.00,"service_code":["11","22"],"negotiated_type":"negotiated","expiration_date":"2024-12-31"...
✗ NPI 1234567890 not found in provider cross-reference
in-network-rates-2024-02.json (312 GB)
⚠ Billing code "70553" maps to 3 different descriptions across files
"allowed_amount":null,"billing_class":"professional","billing_code_modifier":[]...
✗ File corrupted at byte 96,847,203,441 — retry?
allowed-amounts-2024-Q3.json (67 GB)
Processing... estimated 4 hours remaining
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What We Built

We wrote a pipeline that downloads these files, parses the data, and loads it into a queryable database. Then we built tools to let you actually explore it—search by billing code, compare rates across insurers, look up what your provider gets paid.

Code Lookup

Search by billing code to compare what different insurers pay for the same procedure.

Provider Search

Find a doctor or hospital and see the rates insurers have negotiated with them.

Insured Groups

See which employer groups and plans are covered and how rates vary across them.

Insurers

Explore which insurers we track and how much data each has published.

Pipeline

Watch the data pipeline in real time as we download, parse, and load insurer files.

See Behind the Curtain

The data is public now. We just made it readable. Start with a billing code, a provider name, or dive into the raw pipeline.