Terms of use
The plain-English terms for reading and reusing Paid & Penalized: what its numbers are, what they are not, and how to credit them.
In briefPaid & Penalized
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Free to read, and free to reuse with credit.
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Not affiliated with or endorsed by CMS, any hospital, health system or health plan.
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CMS’s values appear as CMS published them. This site’s own calculations are labeled.
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Not medical, legal, financial or investment advice.
What this site is
Paid & Penalized explains Medicare’s hospital payment programs with the public data CMS publishes. Each program’s pages show what CMS decided for each hospital, how CMS’s formula got there and, as an estimate, what the decision is worth in dollars.
Not affiliated
Paid & Penalized is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Department of Health and Human Services, or any hospital, health system or health plan.
What the numbers are
Where CMS publishes a value, these pages show it as CMS published it. Where this site recomputes CMS’s arithmetic, or estimates something CMS doesn’t publish, the page says so, and its Methods page shows how.
An estimate applies CMS’s published method to public data when an input CMS used isn’t public. It comes close to CMS’s figure, and the page says how close.
What the numbers are not
Nothing here is medical, legal, financial or investment advice. A hospital’s result in a CMS program comes from CMS’s formula applied to the data hospitals report to CMS. It is not a quality grade, and it says nothing about any one patient’s care. Don’t use these pages on their own to choose a hospital or a treatment.
How current it is
Every page built from CMS data names the CMS file it uses and when CMS released it. CMS revises and replaces its files. This site can lag behind a new release; when it is updated, its corrections log says so. Before relying on a number for a decision, check it against CMS’s own release.
Reusing this work
This site’s text, charts and derived data are licensed under CC BY 4.0: reuse them, commercially or not, with credit to Paid & Penalized and a link to the page. The code is under the MIT license. CMS’s data are works of the U.S. government. The typefaces are under the SIL Open Font License.
No warranty
The site is offered as is, without warranty of any kind. Its author is not responsible for decisions made with it.
Questions
Send questions through the feedback form (opens in a new tab). To report an error, see Corrections.