Waypoint Ledger

The register

What the public has told the government

Shown at about 200 answers as an illustrative sample, so every section reads at scale. The exports and the API carry only real answers. The live count holds exactly what people have sent so far.

Every row is a count of what people sent through this tool, with its N and its dates.

thumbs on published federal figures

people reporting uncounted care

burden rankings

written interviews

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Who published the figures each section is about

A thumb on a published federal figure, an event no dataset recorded, or a ranking of which cost weighed most — each published with its N, its denominator, its dates and where the people came from. Nothing identifies anyone.

  • Corrections — bound to one row of one published file. Of the 274 rows this tool prices, 257 were published by CMS, 12 come from AHRQ's MEPS survey, 2 from AHRQ's HCUP, 2 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and 1 from the General Services Administration. Two of the MEPS rows are a peer-reviewed analysis of that survey rather than an AHRQ publication, and every screen that prints them says so. Each correction below is grouped under the body that published it.
  • Care that produced zero rows — about what MEPS and HCUP (AHRQ) and Medicare claims (CMS) do not record at all. No published figure exists to correct; this is the count of the absence.
  • The burden ranking — the stated basis for weighing kinds of burden, the question NIH health economists put to every cost-of-illness estimate. Published as a distribution with its N, with no weighting scheme of ours underneath.

We publish no agency inbox we have not verified, so nothing here mails anyone automatically. Every correction below copies out as a citation block — the row, the file, the figure and the count — that a person at the publishing body can act on directly.

Which cost weighed most, ranked by the people who carried it loading

Thinking about the whole time you were looking for a diagnosis, rank these from heaviest to lightest. Five burdens, ranked by each person. Reported as how many put each first, how many put it last, and the mean position. No weighting scheme of ours underneath.

Corrections on published federal figures loading

Each ledger line carries a thumb, and a thumb is bound to the exact published row the price came from. They are grouped here under the body that published the row, then under the file it is in, so enough of them on one row is something that body can act on. 52 of the 274 rows also carry a figure for each of the 109 Medicare localities, so a correction can be read against the figure for the place the person actually lives.

Care that produced zero rows in federal data loading

MEPS, HCUP and CMS claims record care that was delivered and billed. A visit that never happened, a test that was refused, months lost waiting: none of it leaves a row. This is the count of it, out of 0 people who answered.

Written interviews loading

Held privately, never served. What changes because of them is published here as “a user said this, so we changed that”, with quotes only where the writer chose to be quoted. Give one.

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Take the data

De-identified CSV, the data dictionary that describes every field, and the method. An agency, a researcher or a committee staffer can use these without asking us. The corrections file carries the federal file, its SHA-256 and the line each figure was read from, so a correction can be routed to the office that published the number.

Method: every figure on this page is a count of responses exactly as entered. No weighting scheme of ours, no imputation, no extrapolation to a population. The sample is self-selected and recruited through the channels listed; it describes the people who answered and nobody else. A raw N with its denominator and a date is published with every number so it can be read as what it is. Any cell holding fewer than 11 responses in a named place is withheld and counted as withheld. That threshold is ours, not an obligation we are under, and 11 is where it sits because it is the floor CMS puts on researchers using its own beneficiary files: under the CMS cell-size suppression policy no cell holding 1 to 10 people may be reported at all.