I wonder if there is a straightforward way to aggregate people's bills to estimate the cost of a procedure (eg appendectomy) at a given hospital. Eg pay people $1 to scan their bill. This would only work for common procedures I suppose.
HIPAA was passed largely to prevent this potential catastrophe for healthcare executives. b^)
So build it in Europe?
De-identified data and data contributed by people (read, not Covered Entities) is not covered by HIPAA. Someone could build a database of procedure cost comprised of these data sets, but price transparency isn't so easy due to the nuances of the problem (See Castlight Health).
That's a great idea because the codes are usually on the bill, too. The problem, of course, is keeping all of that volunteered data secure.