"But seriously, how can it possibly be the hospital's fault for doing exactly what the law and market incentives give them every reason to do? "

Because they're the ones actually doing it? Because they're run by adults who are fully capable of taking responsibility for their actions?

The US (and others, but the US especially) has a long-standing practice of divesting corporations from the responsibility for their actions.

Worse, it's frequently the same people who argue that corporations are "people" arguing that corporations as a whole shouldn't be held responsible for their actions.

A profit-making corporation exists to make a profit, which isn't illegal or immoral, so I fail to see what 'responsibility' they have other than continuing to do what their shareholders have literally given them money to do. Your problem is with the system, not with my grandma whose pension fund is invested in the hospital.

For what it's worth, I'm not interested in blaming the corporation for trying to raise profits. I just think that clearly the system is not ideal, and the right way to fix the system is probably different depending on whether the diagnosis is 1/ inefficiently-operating nonprofits or 2/ non-consumer-happiness-optimizing corporations.

Right, I definitely agree with you. My only point was that it's easy to point to villains but real solutions are structural.

Nobody's denying the facts you gave...lack of competition, lack of transparent pricing, etc.

But to use people's lives as leverage to extract absurd amounts of money goes well beyond being immoral, it's just downright evil.

If making money from using people's lives as leverage is evil, then let's go ahead and condemn doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, insulin injector manufacturers, and lifeguards while we're at it.

I'm almost rendered speechless at the absurdity of your suggestion.

Of course they deserve to be paid. And paid quite nicely, too, considering the education levels needed to work such jobs (Lifeguards, obviously requiring significantly less than doctors)!

But they can be paid nicely while charging reasonable prices. The $164k the hospital charged that man for his heart attack is beyond unreasonable.

But who gets to decide what is 'reasonable?' The point of the parent post is that there are no forces keeping prices down besides this vague standard of 'reasonableness', which obviously isn't very useful. Shame doesn't bring down prices; competition and structural reforms do.