It's really not the doctors charging crazy amounts, it's the hospitals. MBA types got into medicine and squeeze it like any other industry. GI does a scope? Doc gets $200 for doing the procedure, facility gets $5k for a facility fee.
100% agree here.
As someone who has worked in medical billing, unless it’s a small private practice (in which case it would not apply here), the doctors don’t give a shit about you paying the bill.
There is a whole department of people who specialize in nickel and diming every possible thing that was with range of you, at a markup that would make any decent person blush.
Then that money goes to the hospital to turn an insane profit.
But don’t forget about the insurance companies - they’re just groups of bankers and lawyers working together to figure out how to squeeze as much money as possible out of every aspect. The worse coverage they provide, the stronger the insurance company gets (the race to the bottom).
Insurance companies are a new level of evil; they fight both the person and the hospitals to pay as little as they can; their practices are in large part what drove hospital billing to be what it is.