As most here probably know, medical bills in the U.S. - in addition to being high - are almost never advertised, often erroneous, often inflated via agreements with insurers, and can often be talked down as soon as the recipient points out issues with them.
What if there were a website where people could report their invoices from different providers, tagging them by state, by insurance provider, by insurance plan, itemizing the charges for each piece of care, and including both the base charge and the amount covered by insurance, and then the site could a) aggregate this data to help people understand how their costs compare to others for similar treatments, and b) raise general awareness of the prices. If prices won't be transparent up-front, we can make them transparent after the fact for the next person. Beyond just helping individuals, if this got big enough it could conceivably push down prices as providers are forced to compete.
A journalist at Vox did something similar (for a one-off investigation) at one point: https://www.vox.com/2018/2/27/16936638/er-bills-emergency-room-hospital-fees-health-care-costs
But of course what I'm talking about would be an ongoing, ever-growing, self-reported dataset.
Does this exist? Could it exist? Anybody want to collaborate on it?
The issue I was facing (and the reason I stopped working on this project) was the lack of standard, openly-available medical codes, since most hospitals mark treatments with CPT codes, which are proprietary and require a license to use in software. If anyone has any solutions to translate these codes to human-readable names without licensing the entire set of codes from the American Medical Association, I'd be open to hearing those ideas.