Similarly, doctors often won't know the cost difference between various medication options, and those costs are always extremely difficult to figure out since there are usually various coupons that last for various amounts of time, which if you are willing to sort through you can game the system a lot. But in the long run it would be better if those games didn't exist. Switching asthma meds as you run through coupon time limits isn't really the healthiest thing anyway.

Or you are hit by a car, an amublance shows up "what will the bill be? Oh I'll call a different service" no, you can't do that while you are bleeding out, nor will you have any way of knowing which hospital will have the best rates to fix you, you don't even know what is wrong yet!

One might conclude that private, free markets don't make sense in this domain at all, perhaps.

followed by

> One might conclude that private, free markets don't make sense in this domain at all, perhaps.

is an odd conclusion to draw, since the agent primarily responsible for the inability for providers to provide transparent prices to privately insured patients is, ironically, Medicare.

I'm not sure how you can be so certain that is the 1st order reason. The pricing situation seems to often be obfuscated by our private insurance companies as well. When people have different insurance plans, with different back room deals on rates, and different customer out of pocket rules, or none at all, how is the doctor to know what your price is going to be? How does erasing medicare from the equation fix that?