Hospitals lift curtain on prices, reveals giant swings for hips, knees and more

The US healthcare system is just a completely broken mess. When things go smooth, you are lucky! However, when you have a major procedure, life event or sickness things can get messy quick.

We had a child 10 months ago, billing was screwed up by the hospital, then by insurance and we are still in process of getting it resolved. I have now spent at least 8 hours on the phone.

I had a surgery, called insurance and verified it was pre-approved and in-network. After procedure I receive $22k bill. I was young and did not care about my credit back then and never paid. 5 years later I received a new bill, for $300 as the provider sued the insurance company.

I hate going to the hospital and AWAITING a shower of bills. This grinds my gears SO hard. Every hospital stay and bills just keep coming for a few months.

As someone who likes to budget and plant expenses, I just cannot stand the US medical system. I never know how much a simple wart removal my cost. $100 or $2000? I'm happy to have good insurance, don't require to use the medical system a lot and have enough money. However, if you are extremely ill you seriously need to move to a "FIRST" world nation or have a good insurance with low max out of pocket. However, you still are going to deal with bills like its your full time job.

It does for less regulated markets, which is why you get those promotional mailers with promotional prices on LASIC or teeth whitening.

Medical lobby benefits from high barriers to entry, suppressed competition (from foreign doctors or medical tourism companies able to fly their customers abroad) and opaque pricing. Uninformed consumer forced to shop locally is rarely able to extract best pricing.

You can look at the annual fear-mongering fairs where medical lobby has been attempting to insert itself as a rent-seeker into kidney dialysis services in California. It's not like those industries are run by altruists, but on TV concerned serious faces in white coats would tell you in alarmist tones how those centers are run without professional supervision and people with no medical training, but when you vote properly, some [highly paid] individual with medical credentials would make things so much better [albeit more expensive in the long run].

> So how do they quote that when the complications can be unpredictable?

Then they should be ones buying “price insurance” to compensate them potentially exceeding the quoted costs. That also has the pleasant effect of aligning incentives so they can keep their costs accurate.

Yup, which shows that the healthcare system in the US is not even remotely a free market.

Yes to all of this. That's the problem.