★☆☆☆☆1 Star Hospitals

A 1-star CMS rating places 1 Star hospitals in the lowest performance band nationally on the CMS Hospital Compare composite. Star ratings are risk-adjusted, but lower-star hospitals often serve more complex patient populations — context that CMS publishes alongside the headline number.

CMS publishes the underlying domain measures alongside the star rating on the Care Compare site so patients and clinicians can see which specific dimensions drive the headline number. For a planned admission, drilling into the procedure-specific complication, readmission, and mortality measures usually tells a more useful story than the composite alone.

Average payments in the 1 star cohort runs above the national Medicare payment baseline, about 9% over the national average. Higher payments often correlate with academic medical centers, denser metros, larger case mixes, and Medicare wage indexes calibrated to higher-cost labor markets.

Star ratings are intentionally independent of price. The CMS composite measures clinical and patient-experience outcomes, not cost. That decoupling is why we publish a separate Value Score — combining Medicare payment data with CMS quality measures — so patients can see how price and quality interact within a cohort. The 1 Star hospitals cohort spans 229 hospitals, large enough that averages reflect the segment but small enough that high-volume outliers can move the mean noticeably.

Under the HospitalCostData Value Score, this cohort breaks down as 0 A, 0 B, 31 C, 156 D, and 42 F. Higher star ratings are not automatic A grades — payment levels also factor into the composite. The Value Score is editorial and informational, never a clinical recommendation. For care decisions, refer to your physician and the underlying AHRQ-derived quality indicators on Care Compare.