About CareCost Explorer

Since 2022, federal law has required health insurers to publish the rates they have negotiated with providers. It is one of the largest healthcare-pricing disclosures in U.S. history — and almost nobody can use it. The files are enormous, fragmented across hundreds of payer URLs, and structured for machines, not people.

CareCost Explorer exists to close that gap. We ingest these Machine-Readable Files at scale, clean and normalize them, and turn tens of millions of raw negotiated rates into clear, comparable figures you can actually read — medians, ranges, and coverage by payer and region. No data-engineering team required.

The system made sure no one could answer the price question — so we read what it buried and handed it to you. Every rate traces back to a payer-published source file you can check. We are deliberate about what we claim; see our Methodology page for exactly how the figures are sourced and computed, and what they can and cannot tell you.

The product is built for analysts, researchers, journalists, employers, consultants, and operators trying to understand what care actually costs.

Erin Rose

Founder · LinkedIn

In specialty pharmacy, one question decides everything — what will this infusion actually cost this patient? — and answering it honestly takes 45 minutes of hard math, because every number is public and nothing connects them. Erin Rose founded CareCost to build the tool that should have existed. She parsed the 60 terabytes of “machine-readable” rate files insurers publish but no human can read, and built the products that put real prices in practices’ hands. Before CareCost, she spent twenty years building AI-augmented data and revenue systems inside national media organizations — including leading AI adoption for a 200-person sales organization. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Questions, ideas, or feedback? Get in touch.

Ownership & accountability

CareCost Explorer is an independent, founder-operated company. We are not owned by any health insurer, provider system, pharmacy benefit manager, or private equity firm with interests in healthcare pricing. No payer has a financial relationship with us that could influence how their rates are displayed or compared.

Revenue comes solely from subscriptions. We do not sell advertising, run sponsored content, or broker user activity data to third parties. The product’s incentive is simple: if the data is trustworthy and useful, subscribers renew. That alignment matters in a space where many “transparency” tools are funded by the parties whose prices they report.

If you find an error or have a question about how a figure was derived, email hello@carecostexplorer.com. Every report is reviewed. See the Corrections & Data Integrity Policy for the full process.