The same brain MRI, same insurer, $4,236.36 apart across town.
Chicago hospitals publish what they charge. Almost nobody reads it. We do — and we show you which door is cheaper before you walk through it.
59 price files from 56 hospitals, last fetched 6 August 2026. How this works
What this is, and why you can believe it
Every hospital in the country is required by federal law to publish what it charges, in a file anyone can download. The files are enormous, badly named and unreadable. We read them for the Chicago metro and put the prices back in plain English. That is the whole product.
Nothing here is estimated. Every figure on this site is a row from a hospital's own file, shown exactly as published — never averaged, never rounded, never a midpoint. If a number is on this site, it is in a file, and the file is one click away with the date the hospital stamped on it and the date we fetched our copy.
We tell you what we do not know. Where a hospital's file is too incomplete to line up fairly against the others, we say so and show it anyway. Where a hospital publishes a formula instead of a price, we say that too. We hold nothing about how any hospital treats people — this is about their paperwork.
These are prices, not bills. What you finally owe depends on your own plan, your deductible and what actually happens on the day. A published rate tells you what the hospital and the insurer agreed the service costs, which is the number nobody would otherwise show you.
Free for individuals, permanently. No account, no sign-in, nothing about your health stored anywhere. What you searched for lives in the address bar and nowhere else.
What we can answer today
Every procedure here is published by most of the hospitals we cover, so you get a real comparison rather than a page with two entries on it.