Anyone else get the feeling this is malicious compliance on behalf of the insurance companies? "Oh, they're going to force us to publish our prices are they? Well we'll publish so much data it'll take a herculean effort to make it readable to anyone that doesn't work in data engineering"
The article mentioned CSV files, it seems more like a reflection of what a huge bureaucracy the US healthcare system is. I liked their suggestion that the government should have created the database as part of the law, done the processing on the raw data, and made it more accessible.
Linking a few trillion records doesn't seem that difficult. It should be doable with a good data warehouse and a reasonable entity linking model. I suspect that we'll find more than a few instances of fraudulent behavior once the data is linked.
My father was nearly pushed into ~2 Million dollars worth of brain surgery that was unnecessary. Not only was the procedure unnecessary, the price for it was >5X what a top-3 hospital would have charged. I only became privy to this once I pushed him to come to Mass General Hospital (MGH) for a second opinion. The surgeon we saw at MGH also believed the suggested procedure to be dangerous.
I wonder if it's possible to cross-reference mortality/complication rates with prices...