Billed charges vs. the hospital's own published payer-negotiated rates (45 CFR § 180.50 machine-readable file). Bills are analyzed in memory and never stored — the server keeps only public hospital pricing data.
A free tool from Empower Injury Law. Hospitals routinely bill uninsured patients several times what they accept from insurers for the identical service — this tool shows that gap, line by line, using the hospital’s own federally required pricing file.
| Hospital | File date | Items | Rates | Notes |
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| Code | Description | Qty | Billed $ |
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Suggested offer = disputed lines at , all other lines at full billed charges. Toggle the “Dispute” box to recalculate.
| Dispute | Code | Description | Billed | Published min | Median | Published max | Cash price | Billed ÷ max |
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Source: hospital’s machine-readable standard-charges file published under 45 CFR § 180.50 (file date ). Amounts shown are rate × billed quantity. “est.” rates are the hospital’s own estimated allowed amounts for percent-of-charges contracts. Rates priced as a percent of total billed charges are excluded from the min/median/max benchmark because they scale with the chargemaster itself; they remain visible in each line’s rate detail. “Cash price” is the hospital’s published discounted-cash amount (insurers’ purchasing power typically wins deeper discounts, so a genuine cash price is a conservative measure of a reasonable charge). The column shows N/A when no discounted cash price is published — including when the published figure merely restates the gross charge, which is a chargemaster price, not a cash discount.
It compares each line of a hospital bill (by CPT/HCPCS code) against the prices the hospital publishes in its federally required standard-charges file — what insurers actually pay for the same service, and the discounted cash price when a real one is published. It then suggests a defensible amount to offer, with the hospital’s own numbers as the exhibit.
Federal price-transparency rules (45 CFR § 180.50) require every U.S. hospital to publish a file listing its standard charges — including the rates it has negotiated with each insurance plan — and to link it from its website. Type a hospital or health-system website above and the tool finds the file automatically.
Hospitals bill from a “chargemaster” — list prices almost no payer actually pays. Negotiated insurer rates are often a small fraction of billed charges. For uninsured patients and injury-lien cases, that gap is evidence of what a reasonable charge looks like.
No. Bills are processed in memory and never stored or logged. The server keeps only public hospital pricing data, which contains no patient information.
No — it’s an informational tool. If a hospital bill or lien relates to an injury claim, talk to a lawyer about your specific situation.
Bills you upload are processed in memory and never stored or logged; your entered bill is saved only in your own browser. Hospital pricing data is public information published under federal price-transparency rules and is cached on the server for everyone’s use. This tool is informational — verify figures against the source file before relying on them; it is not legal advice.