It's not just this single issue. It's any number of things. The media latches onto a headlline of it's choosing and wont let go of it. Anything that contradicts the "narrative" is suppressed. The entire news media is a farce (and not just game journalism).

I've seen state ratings that have flatly contradicted my own personal first hand experience.

Plus the "price" of American healthcare is potentially a very misleading thing as others (and myself) have already indicated.

The OP was about lack of transparency in billing and quickly got hijacked by eurotrash trying to repeat the same tired media narrative about socialized medicine and American healthcare. This kind of stupidity is how we end up with "reform" legislation that doesn't address the relevant crap.

People that are genuinely poor have a public option to fall back on.

People that are not genuinely poor are merely confronted with services that are as expensive as the consumer products they willingly indulge in without ever considering the implications.

In other words, you have to go to a lot of bother that really shouldn't occur to begin with. ALL billing artifacts should make sense BY DEFAULT. It should not require extra special diligence on the part of a patient (or any other sort of customer) to get a real bill or see what the real costs are.

The fact that this is not the norm is directly attributable to the "someone else will pay for it" mentality.

I'm pretty sure that the drug that I am on currently isn't allowed by the NHS because it's too expensive. Although it's not just the UK. Our own "public options" have similar problems where expensive treatments aren't covered either.

It gets even better. The doctors that aren't really employees are liable for the actions of hospital employees that they have no control over. The mistakes of a nurse or an anesthesiologist are ultimately on the "outside contractor". He is stuck with the liability and he is stuck paying his own medmal premiums and they are by no means cheap.

That is not "price controls".

That's disallowing hospitals to gouge customers that aren't some large corporation.

Beyond your apparent allergy to individuals being protected under the law, there's the problem of transparency and accuracy that's destroyed by the current hospital billing system. The "rack rate" is a fiction that needs to just disappear.

I am not impressed by the media narrative.

You will have to do better than that.

I have occasionally seen claims such as these contradict my own personal first hand experiences, so I am not sure I would take them on faith. Numbers can be twisted to suit any agenda and make even the most absurd claims seem legitimate.

It also has to be noted that the American poor do actually have a government option to fall back on. It's horrible. That's why many clued in Americans don't want that imposed upon them.

Japan and Germany are specially well suited to welfare programs in general because of their culture. They're not going to abuse it or run amok like Italy or Greece. You can't just rip a social system out of it's cultural context and expect it to just magically work.

What I hear from Canadian patients inspires no envy what so ever.

Sure. That's exactly what we need: less transparency and less patient responsibility. That's just the "perfect" response to an OP that is complaining about the utter lack of accountability or auditability here.

Plus you get the added bonus of no alternative options and no recourse for incompetence and delay.

The last two times I was in the ER, I would have happily yielded to an actively bleeding patient.

I am not a total anti-social psychopath despite what some of my posts might indicate.

Not only do we have medical bills (or EOBs) that are completely incomprehensible, we also have a price structure that's treated like a trade secret while also being a work of fiction. My medical expenses for the last year were billed at 4x the amount that was actually paid by my insurance company.

The basis of your premise is wrong.

iCrap isn't any more popular than Android despite your whining.

> When there's a new version of Windows, I get it the day it's released.

This is just unwise.

> When there's a new version of Ubuntu, I get it the day it's released.

This is really unecessary.

The idea of cramming a new OS on old hardware automatically and without any care for the process has always been stupid. This idea is primarily an artifact of a particular company that lowered everyone's expectations.

Shoving new IOS on an old router doesn't even automatically makes sense.