Most billing departments won't provide prices without the billing codes for the procedures. How do you get the billing codes? You have to see a doctor and get a treatment plan. How do you find out how much seeing the doctor is going to cost to get your treatment plan? You call the billing department for a quote.

We went through this during a very stressful time when my SO found a lump in her breast, and it took the kindness of a nurse that worked between the doctors and the billing department to give us a possible list to get a ballpark of what to expect. She called us after hours to tell us because she didn't want to get in trouble with her manager.

Once we had that information, we called several hospitals for quotes and ended up being offered 40-70% discounts. It went from thousands to hundreds to ultimately having some of the tests comped... all because we had a little information and asked the right questions about the process.

This is a disgrace and not how you treat people's health.

I agree with everything this article suggests, but to be fair to hospitals, they can't really tell you what some procedures will cost for obvious reasons. A delivery may ordinarily cost $x, but if a caesarean is required it may be $x + $y.. etc. A car mechanic will give you an estimate for what it will cost you to fix something, and then call you if it turns out to be more expensive. In a delivery (or a surgery) they can't really ask you if you are OK with an additional cost that may be required, they have to just do it.

However, a hospital could provide a list of prices that are commonly billed. What a list of prices would do is give you a sense if one hospital costs a lot more than another in general. If you knew you might change which hospital you go to and.. you know markets etc.

Your first example is funny, considering that the hospital where my son was delivered sent us a letter about a month before his due date with an estimate of the cost for both normal delivery and caesarean.

Of course it didn't cover every possible contingency... That's what an "estimate" means by definition. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible or even unreasonable to provide a baseline price, along with some of the more common events that can modify that price.

most in the US won't, although some do e.g. https://surgerycenterok.com/pricing/

In my experience during a time when I had no insurance, they often can't even tell you after the fact. Everything has to go through a dozen or more layers of bureaucracy before you get a bill.

I'm pretty sure though they have to supply an 'itemized' list if you ask for one, which you can contest anything on the list and a lot of times take them to court over if they don't budge. Often they will because they know $35 for an ibuprofin is absurd but most people don't think they can win against a big bad hospital.

Here's how it went when I tried to do it upfront. My wife was pregnant, so we had 9 months of routine, scheduled visits. I asked "how much will this cost ignoring any unexpected costs." My insurance had a helpful PDF showing $650 as an out of pocket example with an asterisk saying not to use this number for reference. Reading up, some places offer a "package deal"--our's didn't. I was told to call the doctor's office and write down their itemized list of procedures. Then call their billing office to get an itemized list of billing codes. Then call my insurance to get the out of pocket cost. The final cost was a few multiples of that cited value (although there were additional, unexpected costs).

In the United States each provider has up to 12 months to provide a bill and nobody is required to tell you who all of the providers were.

That is one of the main points of the article.