>>521158841
That's another aspect of private healthcare, ironically a direct result of the free market. Insurance companies want good deals, they want to be able to go back to their boss and say they got X% off, and they want discounts only available through them to encourage people to buy their insurance. They accomplish that by negotiating prices down with the providers; hospitals, out patient clinics, doctors, etc. But of course the providers have the same expenses no matter what, they actually can't give much of a discount if anything, they already priced it at the minimum they need.
So what they do is they mark up the price a ludicrous amount, then give a "discount" which removes the mark-up, which then gets them back to the price they need while giving the guy at the insurance company the "discount" he wants.
And while everybody in the industry understands this is how it works, and that there isn't really a discount, it still works because it says it's a discount. As long as we can all plausibly pretend, it's good.
This screws over regular people who don't know that when you're charged $50,000 for getting your anus fingered by a resident, you're supposed to call the hospital billing department and tell them that you don't have insurance, then you'll get the real price of $5.
>>521159232
I think at this point we would need some Duterte type figure to even think about it. You'd need to stick an AR in a lot of people's faces to get them to change their mind about that whole revenue stream and how it works.