How we price every plan we show.
“Every number from government filings” is a claim you should be able to check. This page names the filings, walks through how a year is replayed through each plan, and lists what we refuse to guess.
The sources, named.
22 pinned plan-year-2026 sources, each recorded with its authority, role, plan year, state scope, and as-of date — 10,435 plan variants across seven states in the live artifact.
Florida, Texas, North Carolina
The CMS Exchange PY2026 public-use files: Plan Attributes, Benefits and Cost Sharing, Rate, Business Rules, Service Area, Network, and the Plan ID Crosswalk — the same files regulators publish for every federal-exchange state.
California
The CMS PY2026 California SBE QHP public-use bundle, supplemented by Covered California's final 2026 Patient-Centered Benefit Plan Designs for variant cost sharing.
Georgia
Georgia Access's nine PY2026 public-use files are authoritative wherever they publish a plan; the CMS Georgia SBE bundle is an explicit fallback for the standards Georgia Access doesn't publish — it never overwrites a state row, and fallback rows keep their CMS provenance.
New York, Washington
The CMS PY2026 New York and Washington SBE QHP public-use bundles — including New York's community-rated family-tier premium structure, modeled as filed.
Geography
CMS Marketplace PY2026 county/ZIP and rating-area bulk files, corroborated against the Census 2020 ZCTA relationship tables, for all seven states.
Eligibility screening
Current seven-state 2026 Medicaid/CHIP references, the 2026 HHS poverty guidelines, and HealthCare.gov/IRS Marketplace rules for tax-credit screening.
How a year is priced.
1
Resolve the county
A ZIP resolves to a county and rating area using the government geography files — including split-ZIP counties, which are resolved explicitly rather than assumed.
2
Take the filed premium
Each plan's premium comes from its filed rate table for that rating area — by age and tobacco status where states rate that way, and by New York's family tiers where it doesn't.
3
Replay the year
Stated care — visits, prescriptions, therapies — runs through each plan's real accumulators: deductibles (medical and drug channels kept separate, as filed), copays, coinsurance, and the out-of-pocket maximum.
4
Screen the subsidy
Marketplace tax-credit rules and the benchmark plan are applied from the same filed data, so the premium a person would actually pay — not the sticker — drives the ranking.
5
Rank by the whole year
Plans are ordered by estimated annual member cost under the captured assumptions. Every figure traces to a filing; the exclusion ledger names any plan we could not simulate and why.
What we refuse to guess.
A cost engine earns trust by what it declines to estimate.
A plan with a missing or conflicting required field is excluded and named in the exclusion ledger — never silently repaired or simulated anyway.
A covered drug's dollar estimate is withheld until its exact plan-level tier placement is known from the issuer formulary — coverage can be source-verified where the federal API exposes it, but a dollar figure is never guessed from an assumed tier.
Plans with multiple in-network tiers stay review-required until the member's actual tier is known.
Ambiguous filed cost sharing (a source string that could be a copay or coinsurance) stays flagged as conflicting instead of being resolved by assumption.
User-entered medical amounts are treated as review-only defaults, never presented as plan-specific negotiated rates.
These limits never become silent zeros — they lower precision visibly, add warnings, or withhold a number entirely.
Sources are verified, not trusted.
Every source is pinned by checksum. A freshness check re-downloads each one, compares its bytes and SHA-256 against the recorded receipts, and fails when a source changes or can't be verified — so a silently revised government file can never drift into the numbers unnoticed. Each source carries its own as-of date; a download timestamp is never presented as the data's vintage.
See it on your own numbers.
Surely returns an estimated annual member cost under the captured assumptions and the active dataset version. It is not financial, tax, legal, medical, coverage, or insurance advice. A licensed human and the member make the plan decision; the relevant Marketplace, carrier documents, provider directory, formulary, and state agency make the final coverage and eligibility determinations.