Find out who gets free care at your hospital. See how much free care it gives. See what it told the tax people about suing patients. See what it pays its bosses. Every number comes from the hospital’s own tax form.
Find out if your bill can be cut or dropped. And the words to use when you ask.
Start here →Free care, unpaid bills, boss pay, and five years of tax forms.
Look one up →Nonprofit hospitals pay no federal income tax. Most pay no property tax either. In return, the law asks four things of them. Write down who gets help paying. Tell patients that help exists. If you qualify, charge you no more than they charge insured patients. And before they sue you, put a lien on your home, or take money from your paycheck, make a real effort to find out if you qualify first.
So asking for help is not asking for a favour. You are asking the hospital to use a plan it must have. Whether you qualify still depends on the line that hospital picked.
We read the tax form of every nonprofit hospital group that files one. That is 1,865 groups. Of those, 1,794 report a free-care number we can measure. We publish what they give. Every number links to the form it came from. One group can run several hospitals.
All 50 states and Washington DC. What each state's nonprofit hospitals report in free care.
See your state →Every hospital group, by state or nationwide, on four separate measures. We do not add them into one score. How to weigh them is your call, not ours.
Open the rankings →Ten hospital groups told the tax people they chased patients before checking if those patients could get help paying.
See the ten →Every number on this site. What it is, how we worked it out, what it covers, and where it came from. If a number is not on that page, we do not publish it.
See the sources →Where our data comes from. The five real weak spots in this measure. And what we never do with it.
Read the rules →Where it comes from. Every figure is taken from a hospital’s own IRS Form 990, Schedule H, and links to the filing it came from. We report what hospitals reported. Where a hospital reported nothing, we say “not reported” — we never estimate, impute, or fill a gap.
What it is not. Where we say a hospital “attests” to something, that describes what it told the IRS. It is not a finding about its actual conduct, and it is not a court record. Figures are as filed for the fiscal year shown and may not reflect current policy or practice.
Draw your own conclusions — from the filings. This site exists so you can read the record yourself. It is published for general information only. It is not legal, medical, tax, or financial advice, it is not a recommendation about where to seek care, and it should not be relied on for any decision without confirming the underlying filing and checking with the hospital directly.
Corrections. If a figure here does not match the filing it links to, we want to know and we will correct it. cashpaymed.org