It's also a poor understanding of the unhealthy, co-dependent, and borderline malicious relationship between hospitals and insurance companies (there are no fai

It's also a poor understanding of the unhealthy, co-dependent, and borderline malicious relationship between hospitals and insurance companies (there are no fair players). Hospitals will attempt to charge an exorbitant fee for any service (usually 3x or more of what they agree with an insurance company to charge). They do this in an attempt to sucker the uninsured out of money. Then, for us lucky enough to have insurance, the insurance company will reject the charge, saying, "nope, we agreed this would cost $x". The hospital always lowers to the agreed price. You can see all this on your EoB - a hospital once tried to charge me $4500 for a test and the EoB showed the insurance company knocking it down to the agreed $800. If all we did was follow emotional, binary reasoning and rid ourselves of the insurance companies, providers would just rip us all off. You have to fix the whole rotten ecosystem.