Hospitals keep ER fees secret. We’re uncovering them.
Reporter Sarah Kliff is collecting emergency room bills as part of a year-long project focused on American health care prices.
Each year, Americans make 141 million trips to the emergency room. In nearly all those visits, hospitals charge patients something called a facility fee: the price for walking in the door and seeking medical service.
Facility fees can be big: Reporter Sarah Kliff has seen charges that range from $533 to more than $3,000. But because these fees are kept secret until you receive your bill, we can’t know how high they get — or how much they vary.
We want to bring transparency to these extremely common but little-understood fees. So we have been collecting facility fee bills from our readers as part of a year-long project focused on American health care prices.
We launched this project in October 2017 and will continue to report on the results through the end of 2018.
To submit your own emergency room bill, go to our secure bill submission site.