Welcome to the wild world of medical billing in the United States. They have a captive market that doesn't get to choose when or how much they're willing to pa

Welcome to the wild world of medical billing in the United States. They have a captive market that doesn't get to choose when or how much they're willing to pay for the critical service, thus when the service is rendered the customer has no recourse but to 'pay' whatever ridiculous number you come up with. They will extract as much as possible from uninsured patients before having to send the bill to collections, at which point since selling a debt to collections gives a fraction of the whole... the bigger the whole the bigger the return. Insured patients are a mixed bag of the former and the "discounted rate", "co-insurance" and "co-pay" scenarios where the costs land somewhere in the range of "reasonable" to "you better get a scholarship timmy"