I analyzed hospital price lists so you don't have to

I've analyzed 1,835 hospital price lists so you don't have to. But if you're a data scientist, you can do it too!

This article was written in part for Python-centric data scientists and programmers, and comes with a tracker where we clean, analyze, and map the real-world data on which this article is based.< /em>

The notebook uses python, polars and altair to perform cleaning, analysis and graphing. I've used a number of neat tricks and techniques to process the data and look forward to your feedback!

In 1990, a baby was born at Northside Hospital in Atlanta. It was me. It was me. He was the author of this article.

I haven't thought much about Northside since. Not until today, which is when I found out they were the first hospital to be fined $900,000 by the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services. Northside just wasn't interested in complying with the CMS Price Transparency Act, which requires all hospitals to publish their prices online in a single machine-readable file.

Instead of publishing its price list, Northside offered patients a phone number to call for a tailored price estimate.

While this is a clear violation of the Transparency Act, they will likely appeal the fine.

Northside may have blatantly violated the Price Transparency Act, but they made me exist safely, so I can't blame too much.

They are not alone either. Some have estimated that only half of the hospitals still display their prices, which is somewhat consistent with the roughly 33% we collected in one of our data bounties.

As one of the only organizations to openly publish this data, we naturally want to see what you can find there. We've already published a few popular blogs, which are equal parts journalism and Python tutorial. If you're interested, check them out.

But while writing these articles, one problem I ran into repeatedly was that after the cleanup, a lot of the data seemed to disappear. Why?

It turns out that pricelists are incredibly difficult to use for a number of reasons that I'll mention later. I blame hospitals and lawmakers equally.

Complying hospitals often publish the least information they can get away with. The CMS law seems to be drafted by non-technicians and leaves room for maneuver for hospitals (1)

The CMS requires hospitals to publish a spot price, insurer prices, and a generic (i.e. the h...