Honestly the biggest pain in the ass when it comes to trying to price healthcare comes outside office visits. Want to go in for a surgical procedure? You think

Honestly the biggest pain in the ass when it comes to trying to price healthcare comes outside office visits. Want to go in for a surgical procedure? You think it's going to cost $X but it ends up costing $X+Y because some complication caused the operation to run 10-15 minutes over the estimated time and now you have an extra unit of time for the anesthesiologist getting billed. Price transparency is great, but office visits are basically the only thing you can estimate well upfront (there's five CPT codes for the visit, 99211-99215 and it's easy to estimate which one will apply based on whether it's a new/existing patient and the level of history/examination you anticipate requiring). I will stand by my belief that the only way to "fix" healthcare in our country is going full single-payer so citizens don't have to worry about whether they can afford to get treated or not.