Fraud is where you lie about a material fact to induce someone to give you some benefit. Where is the fraud here?

The lie is the fictitious "list price" on the bill, which is nowhere near the amount generally paid nor agreed upon beforehand.

Let's say I'm going out and offer to bring you back a sandwich. I can't give you the sandwich and then claim you owe me $20 because that was my price. I either need to form that contract up front, or I can only expect reimbursement for the amount I actually paid.

I call it price gouging, which is not corruption. How is it corruption?

The corruption is how the courts actually enforce these funny money debts rather than doing the right thing and dismissing them. Barring a proper contract (which the sheer majority of these outrageous bills inherently lack), the basis for owing the debt is unjust enrichment. But that means a patient should at most be paying the lower of the medicare/medicaid/insurance negotiated prices - it shouldn't be a license for the hospital to simply make up any number and play poker.

I don't think we definitively need single payer, but we do need uniform (per provider) pricing and price transparency. (Although allowing everyone to buy into medicare/medicaid would be a no-brainer)

Barring systematic reform, I'd really like to see a trend of "healthcare extortion trusts" to keep everyone's life savings safe from these vampires.

> Barring a proper contract, the basis for owing the debt is unjust enrichment.

And I want to add to this: patients can't even be held at fault for this: have no ability to even find out! I've asked and asked for this up front (after being hit myself with a huge bill for what was a tiny visit! No surgery, just an examination!), and been told by providers that it is "impossible" to provide even an estimate of a price, even when the provider has all of my insurance information. Which is bullshit.

To make a patient choose between an unknown bill and their health is extortion.

> The corruption is how the courts actually enforce these funny money debts rather than doing the right thing and dismissing them.

How is that corruption? Who is being corrupted, and by whom? The state cannot corrupt itself.

> The state cannot corrupt itself

Obviously if you define the term "corruption" so that it is inapplicable, then there is no "corruption". FWIW I'm totally on board with viewing "the state" as a singular malevolent actor, I just don't think that paradigm is particularly useful here.

For there to be corruption in this case there would need to be one state organization paying off (directly or indirectly) people in another state organization so the first organization can get what it wants. Is that what you are suggesting is happening here?

My definition of corruption does not require someone being paid off, rather just the decision making process of an authority being well, corrupted, by common interests / worldview / cross pollination. In this case, the courts are treating claims by large institutions as prima facie valid rather than giving each party equal standing and making the claimant substantiate the basis for the debt.

If that price was arrived at by an official process and properly documented, then that's the system working as intended.

The questions is, intended by whom?

So with careful planning and proper documentation you can rob a bank ?

Intent is a serious factor in crime.

Essentially, yes. Please familiarise yourself with sub-prime mortgages and 2007 - 2009.

With the right kind of paperwork you can not only rob a bank you can also make yourself a beneficiary of multiple bailouts and benefits. With even better paperwork you then claim the losses as part of lowering your tax obligation.

Is it theft if you steal QE ?

I mean... is it really there ?