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I went to the ER last year. It was hilarious, in a painful way, to see a two hour visit escalate into $200,000 and going! There is something radically wrong here.

He can join one of those Christian healthcare companies which teach you to negotiate with healthcare professionals.

What a world.

There was a local story in my town about a guy who was taking a certain prescription drug to treat a chronic illness. His copay started at $20 per bottle a few years ago, then increased regularly since then. When it got to $50 he finally decided he had enough. He went to the pharmacy that been filling these prescriptions for years, and asked them how much one bottle of the medication would cost if he paid out of pocket for it. The answer: $24.99

Think about that for a moment. We've now reached the point where people WITHOUT insurance pay less out of pocket than people who are insured!!

I went to the ER last year. It was hilarious, in a painful way, to see a two hour visit escalate into $200,000 and going! There is something radically wrong here.

This. There is a lot of phoney crap going on in the medical system. This is no market based system. It's controlled by Government and Universities to restrict the supply of doctors, and even those that get through are regulated to a crazy extent. Everybody plays games with the billing to, among other things, offset the mandated costs of treating the indigent, who do not hesitate to go into a Hospital emergency room for a sniffle.

This is also an extension of the general education problem. Nowadays, it shouldn't cost several hundred thousand to get a degree. University "credentialism" is keeping those prices artificially high, and we need to first break that bubble so that we can get more people with degrees to be able to go to medical school.

I've heard Texas has been trying to implement a "$10,000 degree" program, and it seems to me this is a good beginning to addressing some of the underlying problems.