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Gotta wonder how other countries with functional healthcare store and calculate pricing. There has to be a better way. This looks like denormalizing a huge numb

Gotta wonder how other countries with functional healthcare store and calculate pricing. There has to be a better way. This looks like denormalizing a huge number of small tables such that the resulting list of prices is like n^n growth for any possible addition.

pc86 3y ago
That's exactly what it is, because as another comment pointed out the legislation currently doesn't allow them to just publish a [human,machine]-readable rules engine for calculating price, so they must publish this asinine amount of data every month in perpetuity until someone who's taken a math class in the last 70 years ends up in Congress.
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  This does seem to be machine readable, but inefficient. Given the fight the insurers have put up about publishing this, I would expect any allowance of "rules engine" to allow them not to publish anything, or to just play the same game again. For instance, my "rules engine" is to look up the price contained in my db table (proprietary, of course) and multiply by another record in a different table. Or if a court forces us to provide both tables, we find that the structure is similarly unusable as this one. So best case is to get the same garbage. Basically, I'd rather force them to be as explicit as possible, even if it's difficult to sort through, than to allow a loophole that might allow them to not publish prices.
  - webstrand 3y ago
    The rules engine could even be turning complete, even if it didn't need access to another data source.
ageitgey 3y ago
In England, the procedure costs for the entire healthcare system fit in one Excel sheet: https://www.england.nhs.uk/costing-in-the-nhs/national-cost-collection/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/costing-in-the-nhs/national-cost-...
m0llusk 3y ago
Oddly enough, despite all the problems in Communist Cuba, they have been able to keep much of a modern health care system going with absolute minimum resources. It appears that empowering doctors to make decisions is a big part of that. Controversial to be sure, but also interesting if only for the extreme scale of contrast.

pc86 3y ago

That's exactly what it is, because as another comment pointed out the legislation currently doesn't allow them to just publish a [human,machine]-readable rules engine for calculating price, so they must publish this asinine amount of data every month in perpetuity until someone who's taken a math class in the last 70 years ends up in Congress.

cool_dude85 3y ago
This does seem to be machine readable, but inefficient. Given the fight the insurers have put up about publishing this, I would expect any allowance of "rules engine" to allow them not to publish anything, or to just play the same game again. For instance, my "rules engine" is to look up the price contained in my db table (proprietary, of course) and multiply by another record in a different table. Or if a court forces us to provide both tables, we find that the structure is similarly unusable as this one. So best case is to get the same garbage. Basically, I'd rather force them to be as explicit as possible, even if it's difficult to sort through, than to allow a loophole that might allow them to not publish prices.
- webstrand 3y ago
  The rules engine could even be turning complete, even if it didn't need access to another data source.

ageitgey 3y ago

In England, the procedure costs for the entire healthcare system fit in one Excel sheet: https://www.england.nhs.uk/costing-in-the-nhs/national-cost-collection/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/costing-in-the-nhs/national-cost-...

m0llusk 3y ago

Oddly enough, despite all the problems in Communist Cuba, they have been able to keep much of a modern health care system going with absolute minimum resources. It appears that empowering doctors to make decisions is a big part of that. Controversial to be sure, but also interesting if only for the extreme scale of contrast.