What every hospital in Virginia and North Carolina charges, in plain English.
Before you schedule a hospital procedure, what does it cost, how does the hospital score on safety, and do you qualify for financial help? Federal law publishes the answers to all three — across hundreds of hospitals, in files almost no one can read. We turn them into one view, in plain English, for every hospital in Virginia and North Carolina.
Search by procedure or hospital name — we'll take you straight to prices.
Featured in WHRO · April 2026
Start from where you already know something.
Pick the entry point that matches what you know. Every path leads to the same underlying data.
Browse by procedure
If you know what your doctor recommended — MRI, colonoscopy, joint replacement, lab work — start here. 104 common procedures with price ranges.
See all procedures →Browse by hospital
If you already have a hospital in mind, look up its profile to see everything it charges, its quality ratings, and its financial assistance policy.
See all hospitals →Browse by state
Virginia and North Carolina covered today. More states rolling out through 2026. Each state hub has the biggest price variations and a downloadable pricing report.
Virginia · North Carolina →A MRI Knee with and without Contrast costs $395 at one hospital and $11,821 at another.
That's a 29.9x price spread for the exact same procedure — same code, same body part, same federal law requiring the price to be published. It isn't a data error. It's the system working as designed. Hospitals set their own rates, negotiate their own insurance contracts, and bundle fees differently.
Until the federal transparency rule took effect in 2021, the only way to find out what anything cost was to call billing and wait on hold. We read the files so you don't have to.
See every hospital's price for MRI Knee with and without Contrast →29.9x variation for the exact same procedure across hospitals publishing their cash price.
In 4 out of 10 cases, your insurance rate is higher than the cash price.
Across 120,000+ insurance-negotiated rates at the hospitals we cover, 4 in 10 exceed the hospital's own cash discount. For patients on high-deductible plans who haven't met their deductible, paying cash is cheaper than using insurance — but almost nobody knows this is possible, let alone how to ask for it.
We surface these gaps on every facility card. Pick your insurance plan, see which hospitals pay more than the cash price, and know before you schedule.
Read the full analysis →of negotiated insurance rates in our dataset exceed the hospital's published cash price.