About
An MRI can cost $400 at one clinic and $4,000 at another a few miles away. Until 2021, you had no way to know which was which until the bill arrived. We're trying to fix that.
PriceCheckMD looks up the prices that health insurance companies actually pay for medical procedures, and lets you search them by procedure or billing code. The data comes from machine-readable transparency files — large public datasets that insurers and hospitals are now required to publish — which we ingest, clean, and make searchable.
Where most price tools rely on estimates, ranges, or self-reported "typical costs," we show actual contracted rates. These are the dollar amounts your insurer has agreed to pay specific providers for specific procedures. They're real, and they vary more than most people would believe.
We're starting with Idaho, with a single major insurer (Regence BlueShield), so we can get the data quality right before scaling out. Our database currently contains over 141 million negotiated prices across nearly 9,000 procedure codes.
The aim is to expand to neighboring Pacific Northwest states and additional insurers in the coming months. If your state isn't yet covered and you'd like it to be, tell us — coverage decisions follow demand.
Health insurance is supposed to spread risk and reduce costs. In practice, the average American faces increasingly thin coverage — high deductibles, narrow networks, and bills that arrive weeks after care with numbers nobody can explain. The information asymmetry favors everyone except the patient.
The federal price transparency rules of 2020-2022 were supposed to change that by making prices public. They did, technically. The files are public — but they're also enormous (sometimes hundreds of gigabytes), formatted for machines, and effectively unsearchable without infrastructure most consumers don't have.
Our job is to do the unglamorous part: download those files, parse them, fix their errors, link them to provider directories, and put a search box in front of the result.
We don't sell your search history. We don't track what procedures you look up and resell that to insurers or providers. We don't ask for your medical information, and we won't.
We're also not going to pretend the data is perfect. Some prices are missing. Some are wrong. Some procedures show up as percentages of billed charges rather than dollar amounts because that's how the underlying contract is written. We'll always show you what we have and label it honestly.
Negotiated rates are the prices insurers agree to pay providers — not necessarily what you'll personally pay. Your cost depends on your deductible, copay, coinsurance, and whether the provider is in-network. Treat this site as a starting point for an informed conversation with your provider's billing office, not as a quote.