Grade C, Average Value

C-grade hospitals score 50 to 64 — the broad middle of the Value Score distribution. These facilities typically post Medicare payments and CMS quality measures near the national median.

These hospitals score 50-64 — the broad middle of the Value Score distribution, with payments and quality near the national median. The Value Score is editorial — built on top of public Medicare payment data and CMS Hospital Compare quality measures — and it is a starting reference, not a clinical recommendation. CMS Hospital Compare publishes its own federal star rating that is independent of price.

Average payments in the Grade C cohort prices out close to the national Medicare baseline, within roughly 2% of the national average. That puts it in the broad middle band of US hospital reimbursement — typical of community and regional facilities away from the most expensive metros.

Within the cohort, hospital-to-hospital variation reflects regional Medicare wage indexes, case mix, teaching status, and outlier-payment adjustments — the same drivers that move pricing across every CMS DRG. 3225 hospitals fall under Grade C hospitals — one of the largest cohorts in the dataset, where aggregates closely track the national hospital population.

For non-Medicare patients, the more relevant figure than the Medicare average is the negotiated commercial rate or cash-pay rate, published by every hospital under the CMS Hospital Price Transparency Rule.

Average CMS Hospital Compare star rating across the Grade C cohort is 2.7, with 596 hospitals carrying a 3-star rating. CMS publishes the underlying mortality, readmission, safety, infection, and patient-experience domain measures alongside the composite — useful when a Value Score grade does not match expectations from the headline star rating.

For deeper clinical context, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Patient Safety Indicators and Inpatient Quality Indicators feed many of these CMS measures and are useful for comparing acute-care facilities directly.