> Almost all of your costs are fixed: salaries, facilities, equipment. And the amount of procedures you can do with those fixed resources varies dramatically.

> Almost all of your costs are fixed: salaries, facilities, equipment. And the amount of procedures you can do with those fixed resources varies dramatically. Yes it does vary dramatically, but there's no way there's 3 orders of magnitude of variation and definitely not 2 orders. There might be a single order from top to bottom, a 2 hour surgery versus a 20 hour surgery or a 15 minute visit with a doctor versus a couple of hours with a doctor. Lawyers have the same problem and while they do bill by the hour, they can generally give you a pretty good idea of what the more basic things might cost to handle. I'm not suggesting that they could give you a +-3% estimate for your SCO vs IBM lawsuit, but if it's a DUI or a will or a trust or whatever, once they've done it a few times they know how the game is played. I totally get that people aren't courts and doctors aren't lawyers, but I think it's a decent counter-example to the notion of "it's hard so why bother trying?"