About ShowTheBill
Who built this, why, and what it is and isn't.
Who
ShowTheBill was founded by Kirk Haines, a software engineer with a long career building data-heavy systems. Every number the site shows traces to public sources.
Why
Since 2021, federal rules have required every US hospital to publish the prices it actually charges (the list price, the cash price, and the rates it negotiates with insurers) in machine-readable files. Almost nobody can actually use those files, though. They are enormous, their formats vary wildly from vendor to vendor, and they are frequently buried where no ordinary person will ever find them. ShowTheBill exists to turn them into something a person with a bill in their hand can act on.
The premise is simple: every number on the site must trace to a public source or to a named assumption. The sources are hospitals' own posted price files, Medicare's published rates, and hospitals' own Medicare cost reports. When we estimate, we show our work, and when we don't have a number, we say so rather than guess.
Independence
Everything here for consumers is free: no ads, no accounts, and the site doesn't collect what you type. Bills you check never leave your browser.
ShowTheBill is published by Content Compass, LLC. The company pays its bills by selling ShowTheBill Monitor, a service hospitals subscribe to for daily monitoring of their own price files. No insurer or advertiser pays for anything. And a hospital's subscription buys monitoring, never treatment: what the public data shows about a hospital is exactly the same whether that hospital subscribes or not.
What this is, and isn't
Everything here is an estimate built from public data, for context. A posted price is not a quote: hospitals can attach different services to the same billing code, and your bill can include separate charges (like the doctor's own fee). Nothing here is medical, legal, or financial advice. It is the information you need to ask better questions.
Contact
Questions, corrections, press: use the contact form. If a price looks wrong, every page has a "see something wrong?" link, and those reports go straight into our data-QA queue. Want your hospital added? Suggest it. For what the data itself shows (price spreads, same-system comparisons), read the Findings.
For hospitals: ShowTheBill Monitor — daily monitoring of your price file.