We answer specific questions with the hospital's own published data.
The free site is the record — what every covered hospital charges, how it scores on safety, and who qualifies for help. Commissioned work starts where the record stops: your specific question, answered by hand from the source files, delivered with the audit trail attached.
Who commissions this work
Attorneys handling hospital liens or billing disputes. When a hospital asserts charges at list price, its own federally required disclosure shows what it accepts from named insurers and cash patients for the same services. We benchmark every line item on the itemized bill against those published figures and document each number's source so it survives a hostile fact-check. See a sample brief — the scenario is fictional; every price in it is real.
Fiduciary Benchmark Brief — for self-funded plans and their advisers. The hospitals your employees use, benchmarked from the hospitals' own published files: negotiated versus cash versus peer systems, procedure by procedure, with chain-of-custody documentation a fiduciary can put in the plan file. Hospitals never pay us; patients never pay us — that independence is the point. What the CAA requires of self-funded employers.
Why this holds up where other benchmarks don't: everyone else in the chain is paid by someone with an interest in the number — data vendors sell to hospitals and payers, consultants sit inside the compensation the CAA now forces into disclosure. We are paid only by the plan, the method is published, and every figure traces to the hospital's own federal filing, so it can be cited, checked, and re-derived by anyone — including the other side. It also needs nothing sensitive from you: a hospital list and a payer name, no claims data, no patient information. One honest limit, stated up front — this covers hospital services, the half of plan spend that is already public, not prescription drugs.
Researchers, policy staff, and newsrooms. Custom analyses from the same data behind our published work, with re-derivable numbers. Journalists on a story: our press desk stays free — start here.
How every engagement works
- Every number is re-derived from the source disclosure on the day of delivery — nothing carried forward.
- Every figure carries its chain of custody: the exact machine-readable file, version, retrieval date, and the CMS-defined field it came from.
- Every brief is read adversarially before it ships — from the chair of the person most motivated to discredit it.
- Founding engagements: $2,500 for a single-question brief, $7,500 for a full pricing review. Scoped quotes for larger work.
- Turnaround: a single-question brief is delivered within 3 business days of receiving the itemized bill; a full pricing review within 7 business days. If your timeline is tighter, say so in the first email and we'll tell you honestly whether we can meet it.
Who prepares these briefs
Every brief is prepared personally by Richard Callaghan, the founder of HospitalCost, who built and maintains the record it draws on — 121 hospitals' federally required pricing disclosures plus 17 federal quality and financial-assistance datasets. Nothing is delegated, modeled, or estimated: every number in a commissioned brief is pulled by hand from the named source file, and the derivation ships with the deliverable so your own expert — or opposing counsel's — can reproduce it.
Who we never work for
HospitalCost accepts no money from hospitals or insurers — that independence is the reason the record can be trusted, and it is not for sale. Patients are never charged, for anything, ever.
Commissioned briefs are data analyses of public disclosures with documented methodology. They are not legal advice, medical advice, or expert testimony.