Articles
Plain-English explainers on the CMS hospital price transparency rule — what a machine-readable file is, what regulators require, and why the data still doesn’t help most consumers without aggregation. For methodology, see the methodology page.
Ashwin Pingali 6 min read
How to estimate your hospital bill in Colorado
A step-by-step guide to estimating your out-of-pocket cost using a hospital's published negotiated rate, your plan's deductible and coinsurance, and a real Colorado example. An estimate, not a quote.
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Ashwin Pingali 8 min read
The hospital bill glossary: 14 terms every patient should know
Plain-English definitions of CPT, HCPCS, MS-DRG, APC, NDC, EOB, deductible, coinsurance, OOP-max, facility fee, professional fee, cash price, gross charge, negotiated rate, and chargemaster.
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Ashwin Pingali 8 min read
What is a hospital machine-readable file (MRF)?
A plain-English primer on the hospital MRF — what 45 CFR §180.50 requires, the four CMS file formats, the code systems, and what the file omits.
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Ashwin Pingali 9 min read
CMS price-transparency regulations explained
What 45 CFR §180.50 actually requires, the 70 CMS-mandated shoppable services, the 2022 penalty schedule, the validator, and where compliance still falls short.
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Ashwin Pingali 6 min read
How we discover and crawl hospital MRF links
No central registry exists for hospital MRF URLs — hospitals self-host, links break, formats vary. How we find, validate, and re-validate the link graph.
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Ashwin Pingali 8 min read
Why CMS's shoppable-services lists don't help consumers
Hospital prices are public; they are not shoppable. Six pieces of friction — and the same MRI knee ranges from $353 to $12,405 across Front Range hospitals.
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Ashwin Pingali 5 min read
What cross-hospital price discovery should look like
An honest roadmap — geographic and plan-aware filtering, quality overlays, and multi-state expansion, with the constraints that go with each.
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