Iowa Hospital Price Transparency Report

Under the federal Hospital Price Transparency Rule, every general acute care hospital in the United States is required to publish a machine-readable file (MRF) listing its standard charges for at least 300 shoppable services. The rule took effect in January 2021, but enforcement has been uneven. CareRanks checks each Iowa hospital's MRF on a monthly cycle and assigns a letter grade reflecting what we could find and parse: whether a machine-readable file exists at the hospital's published location, and how much usable pricing it contains.

In Iowa, 112 of the 134 facilities reviewed are subject to the rule (VA hospitals, federal psychiatric facilities, children's hospitals, and long-term acute care facilities are exempt or fall under separate transparency programs). Of those, 52 have published comprehensive pricing files that include negotiated rates or cash-pay prices on 25 or more distinct DRGs — earning a Grade A or B. For 13 hospitals we could not locate a usable machine-readable file, which earns a Grade F — that can mean no file is published, or that it is published somewhere our crawler could not find or read.

Use the table below to compare grades, see MRF status, and follow the source link to each hospital's published file. Click a column header to sort. If you spot an out-of-date MRF link or a hospital that should be re-graded, use the "Report an error" link at the bottom of any hospital profile.