About ShowTheBill
Who built this, why, and what it is — and isn’t.
Who
ShowTheBill is built and maintained by Kirk Haines, a software engineer who has spent decades building systems in Ruby and other languages. It is a one-person, independent project. The site's full published dataset — every price it shows — is mirrored openly on GitHub, and every number 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 use those files: they're enormous, inconsistent, and buried. ShowTheBill exists to turn them into something a person with a bill in their hand can act on.
The premise: every number on the site traces to a public source or a named assumption — hospitals' own posted price files, Medicare's published rates, and hospitals' own Medicare cost reports. When we estimate, we show our work. When we don't have a number, we say so rather than guess.
Independence
No hospital, insurer, or advertiser pays for anything here. The site is free to use, has no accounts, and doesn't collect what you type — bills you check never leave your browser.
What this is — and isn't
These are estimates 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's 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 — 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 our Findings.