Our mission
Few things have gotten more expensive, for longer, than hospital care. And few prices are harder to see: the same procedure can cost many times more at one hospital than at another a few miles away, and until recently almost nobody could tell.
Since January 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ index of hospital and related services has risen about 331%. Average hourly earnings rose about 155% and prices overall about 108%. Over just the last twenty years the gap is the same shape: hospitals about 157%, earnings about 93%, prices overall about 66%. Software and toys, meanwhile, got far cheaper.
The chart below redraws the idea of howmuch.net’s “20 years of price changes”, in which hospital services topped every other consumer good and service, from public BLS data brought up to date.
Swipe the chart sideways to see every label; the table below lists all the figures.
| Category | Since January 1998 | Last 20 years |
|---|---|---|
| Hospital and related services | +331% | +157% |
| Tuition, school fees and child care | +223% | +96% |
| Educational books and supplies | +217% | +97% |
| Medical care services | +170% | +85% |
| Average hourly earnings | +155% | +93% |
| Shelter | +141% | +85% |
| Food and beverages | +117% | +76% |
| All items (CPI) | +108% | +66% |
| New vehicles | +25% | +31% |
| Household furnishings and operations | +24% | +22% |
| Apparel | +3% | +14% |
| Toys | −76% | −60% |
| Computer software and accessories | −96% | −67% |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via FRED (series linked in the table), through September 2026; the last column runs from September 2006. Prices are consumer price indexes and wages are average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees, not inflation-adjusted. Redrawn in the spirit of howmuch.net’s chart of 20 years of price changes; where that chart used narrower indexes (televisions, wireless phones, college tuition, textbooks) this uses the nearest series FRED publishes.
medprice.ai’s mission is to illuminate the price discrepancies across hospitals. Hospitals now publish their prices, but in huge, inconsistent files. We turn them into something you can search, compare and ask questions of, through code pages that compare every reporting hospital, a hospital directory, and an MCP server that lets any AI assistant answer pricing questions directly.
Once prices are visible and comparable over time, they can be measured the way other markets are. We intend to develop financial products that let you invest directly in changes in medprice.ai’s hospital price data.
This is a stated goal, not an offer. We are not currently offering any financial product, and nothing on this site is investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any security.