I have come to not view a given hospital as an entity. Rather, a hospital is a place (not just in spacetime, but in regulation, and in "the market") where nume

I have come to not view a given hospital as an entity. Rather, a hospital is a place (not just in spacetime, but in regulation, and in "the market") where numerous agents are at work in an opaque manner. Some are frantically billing anything that moves. Other agents are losing money on patients who will not or cannot pay and are looking for ways to balance those books so that they can continue to survive (consider the hospitals closing along the border as the "undocumented" end up in the ER). You have ambulance services struggling as people "cleverly" use them as taxis. Pharma slithers in and out, hoping to recoup their costs on nineteen failing drugs with wild sales of the twentieth. All of this occurs in the hospital "zone," and what patients see is a series of bills emitted, like push notifications out of an API. Making all of this predictable, transparent, and detangled is only step one. Hitting people -- actual humans -- with fraud charges is also a grand idea.