When The Donald signed the order to the medical industrial complex to release pricing information, I had low hopes. Surely, I thought, it would be blocked in court or rescinded by the next administration or something. Well…it wasn’t! But there’s a catch.
The next monthly delivery of US medical insurance pricing data has been released. The releases apparently started in July, but this is the first I’ve heard of them. There is a lot of data in these [1]. It looks like, in the interests of obscurity, they released them in the most decomposed format so it is 100s of TB/Month.
They seem to have forgotten though, that we all potentially have access to big computing now and even analyzing this much data isn’t out of reach. Some organizations are already trying to make the data accessible [2], and various nerds are thinking about what could be done [3].
[1] A trillion prices
[2] https://turquoise.health
[3] Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices | Hacker News