Any business that can afford to splice, destructure, and recompose their pricing into undecipherable mess is a strong sign they're doing too well, and have an u

Any business that can afford to splice, destructure, and recompose their pricing into undecipherable mess is a strong sign they're doing too well, and have an unhealthy stronghold on their customers. If the markets are free enough I'd imagine some hospitals coming up with reasonable price lists that amortise the variance between successive operations and between the hospital and the patient. Most calls are routine anyway. Even car repair shops are able to quote rough price ranges even if they face a lot of unknowns. They will call you back if they find something else, and at least locally should the mechanic commit to a fixed offer he's only allowed to deviate from it by X percent. And routine jobs are generally advertised with fixed prices. The shops will undoubtedly swallow some of the accidental costs themselves to provide tighter quotes which is what customers like. Surely treating a human patient is more involved than that but the mechanism for pricing doesn't need to be. The hospital can calculate how much extra they need to add in the fixed prices to be able to "insure themselves" against the rare pathological case, to some extent. There's always the route of escalation from a routine operation to operating an acute trauma, but I can't imagine that would be common enough to explain the inability to provide reasonable quote ranges.