> Serious question: can anyone point me to some good stories where someone just told these hospitals to fuck off when they try to charge hundreds of dollars for

> Serious question: can anyone point me to some good stories where someone just told these hospitals to fuck off when they try to charge hundreds of dollars for a band-aid or an aspirin? I suspect that would be my response. What happens? Do they just wreck your credit by turning you over to a collection agency? No, and in fact, self-paying (ie, uninsured) patients can pretty much always tell the hospital, "No, I'm not going to be able to pay $10,000, but if you give me a discount to $500, I can pay in cash today". Of course, most patients don't know they can do that. > Can they be sued for price gouging? I'd love to see them legally justify before the court some of this garbage pricing that varies by tens of thousands of percent between providers for commodity items like saline, bandages, and generic drugs. It's not really price gouging the way we generally use that term. Hospitals lose money per-patient on Medicare and Medicaid patients that they treat, and they have to make it back somehow. They way they do that is by marking up the rates for private insurers. By law, they can't present different initial prices to patients (or their insurers) based on their insurance status, so that means that uninsured patients end up seeing an initial bill that's really intended only for private insurers. Hospitals are able to discount that later on, but of course most patients don't know to ask for this. Medical billing is separate from health insurance, and it's a whole complex messy beast in its own right.