Price transparency

Which hospitals block automated readers of their price files

Updated November 9, 2026

Since 2021, every US hospital has had to post its prices, including what each insurance plan pays, in a file that computers can read. Since 2025 it must also keep a short list at /cms-hpt.txt on its website saying where those files are, so that software can find them. That is how this site collects prices: a program reads each list, downloads the files and adds the prices every night.

Many hospital websites turn that program away. 370 hospitals refused it, 9% of the 3,905 we have checked so far. Together they handled 11.0% of all Medicare hospital stays in the latest year. A further 75 had no readable list at the address we know, and 10 published a file whose numbers failed our quality check.

Where every hospital stands

"Not checked yet" means we don't yet know the hospital's web address (it isn't in the list we started from), not that it has no file.

How they refuse

Our reader identifies itself honestly, waits between requests and obeys each site's robots.txt rules. When a site says no, we take no for an answer and try again after 90 days. The answers we got:

• HTTP 403 (access denied): 328 hospitals
• robots.txt tells automated readers to stay out: 28 hospitals
• HTTP 429 (too many requests): 11 hospitals
• a bot-check page instead of the file: 2 hospitals
• HTTP 401 (login required): 1 hospital

A refusal doesn't necessarily mean a hospital is hiding its prices: often the website's security service blocks all automated visitors, and a person with a web browser can still download the file. But the rule exists so that software can compare prices across hospitals, and a file only a person can download is hard to compare.

The largest hospitals that refused

By Medicare stays. Where the hospital lists its own price page, you can download its file there yourself.

By state

This page is rebuilt from our records every night, so the numbers change as files are read and hospitals are retried.

Sources: our nightly reading of hospitals' cms-hpt.txt files and price files (45 CFR 180); Medicare stays from CMS. How the numbers work.