Absolutely, and it is this sort of practice that all Americans could get behind legislation that made it illegal. Unfortunately we can't seem to have a civil discussion on health care to find the issues we have in common.

Our total bill for a normal delivery was 25k. 25k for a doctor and nurse to pull a baby out of the vag!

It took 2 months for the bill to arrive.

Healthcare in US is like legal extortion. You could literally bill for breathing hospital air and people would have to pay.

>You could literally bill for breathing hospital air and people would have to pay.

Don't be ridiculous. You'd be billed for air and hospital odor separately!

Though I should note that a delivery is usually more complex than simply waiting there for the little one to fall out, there is some after care and such that is being performed plus the doctor is usually not that cheap either. (They have a lot of student debt to pay off after all)

Their liability insurance has to cover the costs of lifetime care for any babies that are injured during delivery (juries have made this clear enough). It's not strange that they pass this cost on to mothers.

Medical billing is a nightmare. I have HMO insurance (which means the process should be really streamlined - everything is in-house) and I once tried to figure out why certain rather simple bill item was billed certain cost. It took about three weeks, multiple calls and emails, and speaking to several people, to get to the stage where they said "this is probably because if it was classified as code X, though we can not give you rules why it is code X and not code Y, and there's no way to know upfront which it would be, we'll just send you the bill later and you pay whatever we say" and even then they couldn't answer why sometimes they billed certain percentage upfront and sometimes another, so that you end up getting different pre-payments and different bills for the same thing. This whole thing is an ungodly mess.

Hospitals should be required to publicly post prices, just like fast food restaurants are now required (in some places) to publicly post the calories for each dish.

This isn't just restricted to US. It has become very common even in a country like India for doctors and hospital owners to invite their doctor buddies for 'second opinions' and looking at non-issues and then billing the patients 'consulting fees'.

There is also a huge industry built along the lines of phony testing.

The term used for that think is called 'basin test', basically samples are flushed down the basin and made up numbers are put in reports. You can put in what you like as the doctors know the patient is healthy.