Public money buys this data. The public should get to read it.
To crossfoot a ledger is to add it across and add it down and check that the two totals agree — the oldest, plainest test of whether numbers hold together. That is what this project does to the healthcare system's own published figures, and where it gets its name.
Crossfoot collects the data that publicly funded healthcare is already required to publish, checks it the way an auditor would, and puts it where anyone can use it. The project is open source, and it is built to grow one analysis at a time.
Democratizing publicly funded healthcare data
Vast parts of US healthcare run on public money, and the law obliges the plans and programs that spend it to report how it is used — what gets approved and denied, how long decisions take, what happens on appeal. In practice that reporting lands scattered across hundreds of payer websites, in formats no one opens, with nobody checking the arithmetic. Data that is technically public and practically unreadable is not public in any way that matters.
Closing the gap
Crossfoot draws on legislatively mandated reporting and other publicly available data, validates it, and publishes it in forms anyone can check and use — no middleman between the public and its own data. Lighting up the dark corners of the healthcare industry is how better ideas get their footing; the aim is a system that delivers better service at the best cost, argued from numbers rather than anecdotes.
The method
The same rules hold whatever the subject: every figure traces to a source document, every rate is computed from extracted counts rather than transcribed, contradictions are reported rather than smoothed over, and the misses are published alongside the findings — a dataset that hides what it missed is asking to be trusted rather than checked.
An open project that wants company
Crossfoot is open source, and the work is sized for many hands — finding documents, checking numbers, and deciding what to count next. No healthcare background needed; the whole method is that the documents speak for themselves.