Get access to healthcare payer information directly via Column's API
As of July 1st 2022, the federal government introduced a new disclosure requirement: all health insurance providers must disclose their negotiated rates with all healthcare providers across the US.
Given the steep fines that are in place in cases of non-compliance, nearly every insurance company has scrambled to upload its pricing information to the web. However, just as local public notice mandates do not help the modern world easily access public notice information, the new Transparency in Coverage mandates have not led to the public getting easy access to healthcare pricing data.
These data files are in formats so arcane and so challenging to deal with that it is effectively impossible for anyone to actually make use of this information. Some are sharing tens of thousands of compressed CSVs behind bandwidth-limited URLs. Some are sharing broken JSON files. And some share files on hidden pages, buried deep within the nested sub-menus of their sites.
In aggregate, the impact of these measures taken by these insurance companies is summed up well by Sabrina Corlette, a researcher on the subject at Georgetown, in a quote to NPR:
There is data out there; it's just not accessible to mere mortals
We’ve removed the burden of scraping, structuring, formatting, and compressing large swaths of healthcare payer information and opened it up to the public. This data is available for free to API users.