In principle, putting the costs and prices of healthcare services should have made it easy for consumers to be informed and choose the best value care. Payers and hospitals have released their reimbursement rates and chargemasters, respectively, due to federal legislation. Two good resources that cover the gaps to date in payer transparency data are Considerations for Federal Agencies Tasked with Improving Health Plan Price Transparency Data | CHIRblog and Challenges with effective price transparency analyses – Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.
If I make one suggestion, it would be for there to be a central repository of links to all MRF files which payers were required to submit to, or handled via an API service. It still wouldn’t address the issues of file size, lack of bundling, and other gaps identified in the articles above.
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