Despite all the problems with the law and with compliance, I'm optimistic about this. I think various orgs are going to ravenously pick apart this data, normalize it, make it easy to use for regular people, etc. Gaps are gaps, but messy formats and inconsistent codes and such are the smallest of speedbumps, in my mind.
Journalists, nonprofits, and startups are going to extract every bit of juicy truth there is to find in this stuff. They're going to get to the bottom of every cryptic string by hand if they have to, because there's so much value in this for nearly our entire society. And hopefully, the fines will mean the true gaps get smaller and smaller.
I'm not optimistic. The data that has been out there for years has not yielded end-user usable information. There is too much missing context and billing trickery that it's not possible to tell how much something costs unless you're a
medical coder.
Journalists, nonprofits, and startups are going to extract every bit of juicy truth there is to find in this stuff. They're going to get to the bottom of every cryptic string by hand if they have to, because there's so much value in this for nearly our entire society. And hopefully, the fines will mean the true gaps get smaller and smaller.