Public Doesn't Mean Usable

Since January 2021 the federal government has required every hospital in the country to post its prices. Not a summary, not a hotline. The actual prices, in a machine-readable file, online, where anyone could see them. On paper it was a win for the ordinary person. The prices were finally public.

It changed far less than the headline promised. The average person still couldn't shop. And the reason is the most useful thing I've learned building on top of public data: disclosed and usable are two different words, and the distance between them is where everything hides.

The hospitals complied. They posted the files. But a file can meet every letter of a rule and still be built to defeat the person it was written for: sprawling, labeled inconsistently, one hospital's file structured nothing like the next, the price you'd actually be charged buried among a dozen prices you'll never be quoted. A family staring at a bill they can't afford was, in the eyes of the law, fully informed. The information was right there. It was just shaped so no human being could use it.

Court records work the same way. The record is open. You can look up a case if you already know exactly what you're looking for. But the question a person actually has, what this charge tends to mean for someone like them, in this place, requires seeing across cases, and the public access is built to show you exactly one. The record is public. The pattern is not. And the pattern is the only part that would help.

This is what I didn't understand starting out. I thought the hard part would be getting the data, prying it loose, fighting for access. It almost never is. The data is usually right there, technically public, sitting in plain sight. The hard part is the last mile: turning a disclosure into something a normal person can read, act on, and trust. That last mile doesn't make headlines, and it is the entire job. I should say plainly that I build two of these tools, so discount what follows accordingly. But the gap between disclosed and usable is real whether or not I'm the one closing it, and you can check that yourself, which is the whole point.

What follows isn't comfortable. Opacity no longer requires secrecy. An institution can hand you everything and control the format, and the format does the hiding. This doesn't take a conspiracy. Whether a format is unusable by neglect or by design, the effect on you is identical: everything disclosed, nothing usable. An institution can be fully, genuinely transparent and still leave you powerless, without a single person deciding to hide a thing.

Which is why "just disclose more" is usually the wrong ask. More files, more portals, more mandates to post. None of it closes the gap if what's posted isn't usable. The ask has to be disclose usably; posting one more file the public can't read isn't openness, it's paperwork. The naive version of my own work was "liberate the data." But the data was never captive. What was missing was the translation: the boring, careful work of making public information mean something to the person it's for.

"Public" was supposed to mean "yours." A public record, a public price. The word is a promise that the information belongs to you and not only to the institution holding it. Right now that promise is technically kept and practically broken. The prices are public and you still can't shop. The records are public and you still can't see the pattern. Public isn't a finish line. It's a claim that hasn't been made true yet, and the work is making it true.