“For example, an insurance company may have a contract that says they pay $180,000 for a heart transplant. The payer follows the rules and publishes that price for the list of “all doctors in this hospital.” That means including a heart transplant rate for podiatrists, pediatricians, urologists, and neurologists.”
Insurers have had to publish negotiated prices since July 2022. They comply by dumping about a petabyte a month, with the same rates repeated across 1,000 near-identical plans and transplant prices listed for podiatrists. Deduplicated, it shrinks to a few tens of terabytes. Burying the prices in noise is a lot like keeping them secret.