The anesthesiologist alone will be $5k.

They are the person most able to kill you when they screw up, so a significant portion of that bill is insurance. They also make $300-500k.

Also recovery room or ICU time is very expensive -- something like $1000/hr in some cases.

That type of procedure (gall bladder) will cost something like $15-20k.

When I had a spinal fusion, it was a 4-5 hour procedure involving a neurosurgeon, his PA, an anesthesiologist and his nurse, and 4-5 others. That procedure cost ~ $125k.

Aren't healthcare list prices in the US really really distorted and nonsensical, due to decades of messed up incentives between hospitals and insurers?

Cannot speak for the cause, but the prices are distorted. I was taken to ER a couple of months ago and x-ray of chest cost $3500 and CT of chest $5500. The equivalent prices at the private sector of my home country would have been $70 and $120 and I could have gotten those done just as quickly as in ER in US.

In most places in the US, you can't even get list prices. Calling up providers for quotes gets you hung up on.

Singapore, which has a significant market portion to their health care industry, mandates posting of prices.

I've actually found that you can get list prices from hospitals. The problem is that they're distorted and sky-high and not necessarily very reflective of what you will have to pay if you have insurance, because the insurers have negotiated their own rates. Those rates are treated as top secret by everyone involved (that is, until you get a bill).

Yikes. In that case it'd be cheaper to fly to London and have it done privately here. It should typically be less than $8k for a gall bladder removal.

It's because in healthcare, the vendor never knows if or when they will be paid, and how much it will cost to get paid, so the strategy is to charge as much as possible and just hope for the best. That means people who are dead broke get their care for free since they have nothing to pay with, insurance companies and the government strong arm the vendor into discounts since they buy in volume, and the person that gets screwed is the little guy who makes enough money to not be poor, but not enough money to have gold plated insurance but he also can't fight the hospital.