The insurance I used to have negotiated with the hospital to charge ~$2000 for a five minute CT. The radiologist charged like $30 to interpret it. You can a buy a brand new machine every year with 5 or 6 patients a day.
The anecdote may have been true in 1982 or something.
Meanwhile, no one else can buy a CT because the state regulates who gets to own one.
The cost of a new full size CT machine with surrounding equipment is quarter of a million USD though. Some are more expensive than others, but you can get a new good one for this much.
USG costs few tens of thousands, and maintenance is super cheap, mostly consumable gel, some $8 per patient.
MRI machines are more expensive at half million USD and $120 per patient. (cooling costs)
This includes salaries.
Hospital bed is like $12 per night, staff included.
Germany and Sweden have even better healthcare, mostly due to larger number of doctors and nurses. Not that much more expensive too. Our education and salaries don't keep up.
Possible solution to duplication: decouple tech (test labs) from doctors (hospital)
And it's all amazingly cheap compared to the US, even as a private pay patient. An overnight hospital stay is about 200 EUR, including the attending doctor's fee.
Vet services, by the way, do cost approximately as much as they do in the US, at least for birds.
Some of the newest CT machines are more like $2 million.
Sure the problem is lack of information? Other industries do well with competition.
Almost all medical / dental procedure in Australia has an item number with a roughly known cost. Providers know they can't charge much more than that without losing customers.
And of course competition leads to unnecessary duplication, inefficiency is a well-known criticism of capitalism. But this inefficiency is like the inefficiency that comes from using Python instead of C; it is slower and uses more resources, but it actually gets things done, unlike health care where the inefficiency seems to come primarily from government regulation and lack of transparency.
It does mean you sometimes have to travel further but it works out better for everyone, even for you as the specialist care is within one “centre of excellence” (whether it is excellent is a different point but they could potentially be)
One hospital bought a CT machine. Doctors who are the most important customers for any commercial hospital, began to sign contracts with that hospital because it made access to the CT machine for their patients easier. The other two local hospitals had to compete and bought their own. Now there were three machines and only enough patients to support one of them. That didn't reduce the maintenance costs. The cost inevitably is passed on to all patients. This is only one example from hundreds where competition led to unnecessary cost from duplication. Add to that the overhead for people who specialize in insurance billing because the competing companies are different and very complex, add to that the profit for the investors in the hospitals, the profit for the investors in the insurance companies and that's not even touching the similar stack for pharmaceuticals and supplies. That's not even adding in the cost of delayed and emergency treatment due to lack of preventative medicine for the uninsured and the under insured. All of that adds up to the $99 bag of $0.99 saline that comes out of your pocket one way or the other.
It would be difficult to create a more wasteful or expensive system if you set out to do it on purpose.