Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure

Re:Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings ... by EForEndeavour on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @02:15PM (#28619752)

This is the GDPR cookie popup annoyance equivalent of requiring hospitals to disclose their chargemasters, but not spelling out that the published data should be reasonably human-readabale. Malicious compliance.

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Re:Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings ... by KarlKemp on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @02:37PM (#28620009)

Oh but, if you read slightly between the article’s lines, you’ll notice that the law does require both human- and machine-readable publication.

The machine-readable part is mandated here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/27/2019-24...

As a taste of how specific this is:

    (5) The file must use the following naming convention specified by CMS, specifically: <ein>_<hospital-name>_standardcharges.[json|xml|csv].

And here’s the consumer-readability requirement for 300 “shoppable’ services: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/27/2019-24...

They aren’t always quite as stupid as people make them out to be, these lawyers.

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Re:Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings ... by EForEndeavour on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @03:36PM (#28620763)

From your second link:

> c) Format. A hospital has discretion to choose a format for making public the information described in paragraph (b) of this section online.

This is how you get Excel files with certain column widths set to zero. All it has to be is searchable, free, public, and updated regularly.

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