> 1. You shouldn't be admitted to a hospital for those minor clear-cut procedures. 2. Hospitals receive public funds to offset the costs of some services. 3. Hospitals are required to provide certain services regardless of the customer's ability to pay.

1. All of these simple procedures are part of hospital visits. If your leg is broken, you're going to get an x-ray. Most surgeries are scheduled, and those scheduled procedures also don't clear this bar. And again, we get into the question of why preventative care suffers from the same problems. Your position seems to be that once any part of the procedure becomes variably priced, there's no point in trying to price any other part of the procedure. That's a pretty big leap to me, that's not how other industries work. And hospitals don't even work that way, because they itemize their eventual bills to insurance companies.

And I guarantee that insurance companies are not saying "who cares about the individual procedures you performed or what a technician's hourly rate is, the whole thing is variable anyway so there's no point in justifying any of it, just charge us what you think is fair."

2/3. I'm not asking them to tell me what their rebates will be or what discounts they might give me, 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.

> For more complex services their estimates have enormous error bars.

And hospitals still can't even clear this bar, they can't even tell me what a procedure's price is including error bars.

If hospitals could price their services as well as lawyers, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now.

> Yes but do you have actual data that the benefits are worth the cost? Has it actually driven down health prices in the US overall? Was the additional complexity actually worth it?

To those people, to the people who reduced their bills, yes. Is your assertion that we should only be looking at aggregate benefits? Community health pools and charity drives haven't reduced health care costs overall, but they have helped individuals avoid bankruptcy, and I suspect those individuals are grateful they exist.

I'm also confused at what you mean by additional complexity. Are hospitals giving itemized bills to insurance companies or not? It's really not a big ask for consumers to want to be CC'd into that conversation that should already be happening.

> It's not a free market, and unless we are willing to make drastic changes to society, it never will be.

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.

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. You're upset that line-item pricing doesn't solve everyone's problems, but you can't solve a problem until it's obvious that it exists. At the very, very least, itemized bills and transparent pricing show that a problem exists.

That, on its own, even if nothing else mattered, would make these regulations worthwhile. No entrenched system in the world ever changes unless you put pressure on it.