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Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

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Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#3
post #2

Where is the raw 50-100TB of compressed data available for download? Is it fully public or does it require registration to access?

It's all fully public. Here are some tools that will get you the negotiated rates links along with the sizes of all the files: https://github.com/alecstein/transparency-in-coverage-filesi...

This won't get you all of the insurers, but it'll get you a a few of the major ones.

If you want links to the files of more insurers, here's a project from one of my friends at Postman: https://github.com/postman-open-technologies/us-cms-price-tr...

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#5
Maybe good, maybe bad. I suspect the good will be lower prices as we resolve major conflicting prices for the same service. Maybe bad as we find that nurse Jackie is spending too much time taking care of your sick husband and that needs to cut back as the prices the hospital is negotiating drops. The service will become more standardized and robotic.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#6
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"

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#7

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.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#8
Seems like every week there's a new massive scale DB project or company getting announced on HN.

If they're looking for projects that create public value and demonstrate the power of their products at scale, digitizing this and making it searchable may be a good marketing project that's appealing to certain kinds of customers.

Re: Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

#10

Seems like every week there's a new massive scale DB project or company getting announced on HN. If they're looking for projects that create public value and demonstrate the power of their products at scale, digitizing this and making it searchable may be a good marketing project that's appealing to certain kinds of customers.

Figuring out the size of this data was part of the research phase for doing just that: building out that database. I'm curious to know if other people are already working on it (maybe Turquoise Health?)
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