I don't know about your insurer, but whenever I get an EOB, I see the price the doctor charged and the price the insurance paid. The provider agrees to accept t

I don't know about your insurer, but whenever I get an EOB, I see the price the doctor charged and the price the insurance paid. The provider agrees to accept the lower payment, not the price they charged. Individual negotiation is the same! At a 10k foot level, insurance companies are just an outsourcing of that negotiation process. It feels different, but it's really not. It's perverse that our system's incentives are such that doctors are incentivized to overcharge and that there's an expectation that the price will be negotiated down to the actually-desired price, but that is how it works. It's frustrating, but if you're letting them tell you the sticker price and then pay full sticker price, you're not being lawful good, you're being played for a sucker.