>And hospitals don't even work that way, because they itemize their eventual bills to insurance companies. >Are hospitals giving itemized bills to insurance com

>And hospitals don't even work that way, because they itemize their eventual bills to insurance companies. >Are hospitals giving itemized bills to insurance companies or not? Hospitals can provide an itemized bill after the fact. Not before. They also go back and forth with insurance companies multiple times. It's not actually based on the costs to the hospital. The final itemized bill is the end result of complex negotiation. It isn't actually based on cost. >"who cares about the individual procedures you performed or what a technician's hourly rate is" Insurance companies don't care what a technician's hourly rate is. >I'm asking them to tell me what the maximum amount is they want for a standardized procedure. Possible rebates or lower prices that they can't predict are fine. I want a max price for that specific item. No surgery is standardized. If you literally want the max price, it's going to be so high you'll never be able to pay it. It won't help you. The individual items don't matter--they're fiction. >Then socialize it. If you want to argue that the free market isn't a good fit for health care, fine. But that's not really an argument for keeping prices secret, it's an argument for socializing health care and taking it off the free market. It's not. And it should be public. As long as it's not a free market, none of the normally price discovery mechanisms work at any level in the supply chain. There's no way to provide prices upfront. Any attempt to will fail is just a colossal waste of time. Any list of prices you see is going to be an elaborate piece of fiction. >To those people, to the people who reduced their bills, yes. Those people didn't actually reduce their bills because of itemized pricing. They would likely have been able to reduce them regardless. They negotiated with the hospital successfully after the fact the same way an insurance company would. Hospitals are usually willing to negotiate a bill because they'd rather have some money than none. Whether that's knocking off a line item for $500 aspirin, or nocking 10% off off an opaque $5,000 bill makes no difference. >Which, incidentally, if your position is that health care should be socialized, line-item pricing also helps with that because it makes it obvious that the pricing is screwed up. Average prices for procedures can be calculated after the fact. They can be useful in the aggregate. For non commoditized services the averages aren't remotely useful for an individual.