As Congress grapples with a tight deadline to curb healthcare-fueled deficits, a group of prominent economists and health policy experts last week launched an effort to more closely examine a larger, less transparent segment of the industry's costs: the privately insured.
Four private health insurers said last week that policy experts would soon gain access to a decade of data on the price and use of medical care across the country. The insurers said they'd contribute more than 5 billion medical claims, reaching back to 2000, offering data that was previously available only by request or from companies that sell some information.