A useless baseline. What's important is the negotiated (discounted) price. Then the insurance covers what they cover, and you pay the rest, whether that is a percentage, or a co-pay (and which of several possible co-pays)... example for BCBS:

To fill your prescription at one of the participating Network retail pharmacies, ... you pay only the appropriate coinsurance or copayment amount.

coinsurance = % appropriate = it varies based on the drug category

which really means the more expensive the drug, the higher percentage of the higher price you will need to pay

To file a claim for reimbursement from an out-of-network pharmacy: When your claim is processed, you will be reimbursed up to 55% of the drug's Average Wholesale Price (AWP) for covered medicines and supplies purchased at an out-of-network pharmacy.

Where AWP is code for, "determined however the insurance company feels like", much like Reasonable and Customary is.

It's more complex even than you have stated. The cost is going to depend upon which drugstore you go to, what your insurance company has negotiated with that drugstore (considered a trade secret BTW).

It's a nightmare.

And anyone who claims that Americans are not cost conscious when it comes to medical expenses is being willfully obtuse. They system is designed to make it impossible to comparison shop. You have a procedure done and you don't even know how many different entities are going to send you a bill.

I bet there are thousands of people who would be willing to subscribe to HBO.... if they didn't have to spend $80+ to be eligible to subscribe.

Witchblade is on Netflix streaming. Watch it everywhere.

The dismantling of AT&T in the 80s.

No, Comcast provides 250G at my current cost.
I'm fairly close to cancel cable TV entirely (I've shifted to a less expensive package) because we do not watch it.

Comcast precipitated our whole migration by re-jiggering their offerings and they telling us we needed to spend $40 more a month on a package we don't want in order to keep the other packages we were already getting. Already unhappy with how little there was to watch when I could sit down and watch, I decided to drop a package instead and use my savings to pay for Netflix plus have money left over to buy DVDs or downloads at Amazon. Add in Amazon Prime to help with the Xmas shopping and we now have enough streaming content queued up to watch that no one ever complains that there is nothing on, at a lower monthly cost.

The cable box almost never gets turned on now. Comcast On-Demand is not available because it's not "included" in our package, so even if we wanted to PPV from Comcast we CANNOT. They deserve to have their business melt.

That's what I thought too.
Then since we got a Roku and Netflix for Christmas, our monthly data usage has steadily climbed up from 10GB to 125GB. If our data usage continues to climb we will be at the limit in a few months and we have done nothing except basically replace cable TV with internet TV.

It might not be: https://phillylawblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/are-employers-who-ask-potential-employees-to-turn-over-their-facebook-login-and-passwords-breaking-the-law/

Well if you can't pay to clean it up when you start, what makes you think they'll be able to pay to clean it up later? This is why projects should require bonding up front.

It's especially painful in the nuclear energy sector, where licenses are issued for 20 years(?), and the corporations all assume that the plant will operate indefinitely. If you assume the plant will never be decommissioned then you don't have to budget for it. It's not part of your costs, it's not part of the plan. Someone is going to end up paying to decommission the plants, but they don't plan on it to be them.

PagePlus prepaid plan requires only a $10 recharge every 120 days.
voice minutes are $0.10 or less
uses the Verizon network