What does HackerNews think of price-transparency-guide?

The technical implementation guide for the tri-departmental price transparency rule.

Language: Ruby

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35349634 | Mar 2023
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But that's entirely dependent on the data - if you read the article, you'll see that the author is pointing out how different datasets are reporting different values for the same healthcare service. A correct, properly labeled example is just that - a document where values are accurate rather than misreported.

If you want to get a sense of what a correct, properly labeled example might look like, you should visit the CMS's guidance [1]. Health insurers should be providing documents that follow the format described there, and most importantly, reporting values that are accurate.

[1] https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide
New health insurance “transparency data” looks suspiciously wrong | Mar 2023
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The author has replied to me, and shared these great examples of transparent prices:

https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide/tree/mast...

Along with this fantastic guide:

https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide

I recommend them to anyone who wants to see good examples of price transparency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35350403 | Mar 2023
I'm the author. When I write articles I have to make a choice: make them readable by the public, or detailed enough to satisfy the experts. I try to strike a balance, but I can't have both.

Please take a look at the CMS Price Transparency Guide https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide and familiarize yourself with the schema. You can also take a look at the federal ruling: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/subtitle-A/subchapter-...

The metadata you're talking about is specified in the files themselves. I've limited my search to fee-for-service (non-capitated, non-derived, non-bundled) institutional claims.

You can write to me if you have more questions. [email protected]

A Trillion Prices | Sep 2022
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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
I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to | Jul 2022
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The health insurance companies are now required to publish this and in fact the rule went into effect July 1 2022.

Look up price transparency by CMS (the data will be published in this format: https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide)

Note: the data being published by payors in machine readable format (MRF) is MASSIVE - terrabytes of data. Example: https://transparency-in-coverage.uhc.com/
The prices hospitals negotiate with private insurers for patient services | Aug 2021
FYI, there is a similar effort going on that requires all health plans to host machine readable files containing negotiated rates by provider and procedure code by 2022-01-01: https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide
Regulartors ban hospitals from using “noindex, nofollow” on pricing pages | Apr 2021
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They are doing that as well. They are posting general requirements, as well as providing details on specific situations. From the main project @ https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide

Section: Overview

> All machine-readable files must [...] made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.

Section: Public Discoverability

> These machine-readable files post made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.