It's an entire pipeline of billing to extract the tax benefit of insurance. The real economy has way many more prices than this one - from each store of anythi

It's an entire pipeline of billing to extract the tax benefit of insurance. The real economy has way many more prices than this one - from each store of anything in the country that negotiates from straws to bread. The difference is that these ones happen in a system that has a paper trail from the doctor, to the insurance, and this admin burden is only (apparently) worth it because the vast majority of money in healthcare goes through tax-advantaged insurance. Cash based payment should suffice for 50~70% of healthcare expenditues and it would have more prices and not have expensive and abusive billing processes.