Usa on Big Muddy

Colorado advances ban on algorothmic price and wage discrimination

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:48:00 -0400

The Colorado House voted today to ban the use of personal data to algorithmically set the price of a product or determine a wage. The legislation will now advance to the Colorado Senate for consideration. The summary of the bill, HB26-1210, reads:

Surveillance data is defined in the bill as data that is obtained through observation, inference, or surveillance of consumers or workers and that is related to personal characteristics, behaviors, or biometrics of an individual or group. The bill prohibits discrimination against a consumer or worker through the use of automated decision systems used to engage in:

Individualized price setting based on surveillance data regarding a consumer; or

Individualized wage setting based on surveillance data regarding a worker.

Obviously, the bill enumerates exceptions to the above rules, as it is not intended to ban, for example, charging a customer more to deliver an item a longer distance nor to prohibit schemes like discounts for students or seniors. One of the challenges of writing laws like this is to ensure they are written narrowly enough to target dystopian hyper-individualized pricing based on tracking of Internet and phone activity rather than normal business practices like pricing insurance policies according to demographic risk factors.

Colorado is one of at least a dozen American states considering similar bans. I don’t believe any of these proposed broad-based bans have been signed into law yet. I wrote about algorithmic price discrimination (surveillance pricing) last week in the context of proposed legislation in the Canadian province of Manitoba.

Properly the work of federal public health agencies

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:38:00 -0400

One of the reasons I started this blog was to have a place to put down posts and articles that have lodged themselves in my brain. The wind-down announcement of the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-led COVID-19 data tracking collaboration, is one such article.

But the work itself—compiling, cleaning, standardizing, and making sense of COVID-19 data from 56 individual states and territories—is properly the work of federal public health agencies. Not only because these efforts are a governmental responsibility—which they are—but because federal teams have access to far more comprehensive data than we do, and can mandate compliance with at least some standards and requirements.

After one year of work, the COVID Tracking Project decided to quite collecting data on COVID-19 in the United States, because they recognized that the work of collecting a comparable, national-level dataset was the responsibility of federal government agencies.

As someone who co-led the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group, which curated COVID-19 data for Canada until the end of 2023, I think about this article a lot. It’s a good read, and it speaks to how essential open data was to filling in the gaps in the national and international understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Manitoba introduces bill to ban algorithmic price discrimination

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:30:00 -0400

The Canadian province of Manitoba has introduced a bill to ban algorithmic price discrimination (also known as surveillance pricing), i.e., the use of personal data to set prices for individual consumers:

New Democrats announced in December they would begin cracking down on what’s known as differential or predatory pricing. That is when retailers charge different amounts for the same products based on the timing of customer purchases, where they live or other personal data. […] The proposed legislation would render the use of “personalized algorithmic pricing,” both online or in store, an unfair business practice.

Okay, I guess there’s a lot of different names for this particular practice. Whatever we call it, I believe bills cracking down on algorithmic price discrimination will be very popular, as it constitutes a very clear example of companies using our data against us to rip us off. The most famous recent exposé of this practice is Groundwork Collaborative’s report on how grocery delivery service Instacart charges users different prices depending on who they are.

Manitoba isn’t the only jurisdiction introducing bills targeting this practice, but I don’t believe anywhere in the US or Canada has actually managed to ban it yet. However, New York has made in mandatory for companies to disclose when they use personal data to set prices.

Changes in acetaminophen use after the White House Tylenol briefing

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:17:00 -0400

Back in September 2025, US President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. held a White House briefing linking Tylenol (acetaminophen, or paracetamol to Europeans) use in pregnancy to autism. A new study in The Lancet looks at what happened to acetaminophen prescriptions during emergency room encounters for pregnant females aged 15–44. They used data from a large database covering over 1,633 hospitals and 37,000 clinics.

Here is panel A from the figure in the study, with the vertical dashed line marking the date of the White House briefing (September 22, 2025) and the other dashed lined showing the expected prescribing rates (compared to the observed ones).

Regulatory uncertainty threatens biotech innovation

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:32:00 -0500

Another post from the Clinical Trials Abundance blog, this time by Ruxandra Teslo, on how the recent refusal-to-file by the US FDA for Moderna’s new mRNA influenza vaccine increases regulatory uncertainty and threatens innovation across the entire biotechnology sector. The decision reportedly came after the country’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, overruled career staff to quash Moderna’s application. This is just one more blow against mRNA vaccine technology to come from Health and Human services, the US federal health agency led by the world’s most prominent antivaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

US Medicaid data gets DOGE'd

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:29:00 -0500

The US Health and Human Services DOGE team (I guess DOGE still exists in some form) just released a new aggregated, provider-level Medicaid claims database covering January 2018 through December 2024. With this dataset, you can track the monthly claims for each procedure (by HCPCS Code) and provider over time.

Even if the framing around this dataset’s release is partisan—tied to allegations of Medicaid fraud in Minnesota—it is a genuine advance in transparency for the US’s third largest spending program. No doubt this accomplishment required a lot of work on the backend to harmonize countless fragmented datasets into one tidy schema. These data were difficult to access before, and now they are free for anyone to use. Journalists, policy researchers, and companies working in the US healthcare sector will benefit the most, but every taxpayer benefits from added transparency about where their tax dollars go.

I would say there is the potential for these data to be misused to spark witch hunts, but this is more or less the stated purpose for this data release. Per Elon Musk: “Medicaid data has been open sourced, so the level of fraud is easy to identify.” If you go on Twitter, you will find several people have already plugged in the dataset to Claude Code and trumpeted their ASCII tables of providers flagged for potential fraud. Inevitably, some of these providers targeted by public scrutiny for their unusual billing patterns will have perfectly innocent explanations. But if ProPublica is excited about the release of this new dataset, then so am I.