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"
Oh totally. It also probably is the formats they already had -- so they just dumped them into a file -- versus making something more orthogonal and ergonomic.
I'm not sure what format they store their records in, but I have a hunch it's a lot more structured than what we see in the CSV files. The data dumps have to comply with some CMS guidelines set out here: https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide