That's not fair, because the doctor no-doubt billed separately.

I wish that was the case. If you sort the line items by cost, I would be surprised if labor was on top. Maybe for surgeries, but I doubt that.

My insurance got billed 6k for a chest ultra-sound. They paid 4k. Hospital still wanted around 2k, had to negotiate and pay a little over 1k at the end.

The line item for physician cost (billed separately) had 2 digits.

>If you sort the line items by cost..

Do you really think current health care is giving accurate line items on your bill?

Wouldn't a bill with inaccurate line items amount to a form of fraud?

separate line items, typically

Do you really think current health care is giving accurate line items on your bill?

Accurate or not clinician time is typically billed separately, as are drugs, individual procedures, equipment, etc. Some stuff is rolled up but not that much; hospital accounting systems are quite comprehensive and structured in such a way to help them argue with insurance companies.

So the argument that the crutch is expensive because an MD handed it to you probably doesn't hold, the clinician files something, probably under a CPT code, and you were billed for that separately.

This depends on the service of course, you may see say a CT scan where the room time & tech etc. are rolled into one item, but the radiologist review is separate. So it isn't just people vs. equipment, etc.

I never said it was the only reason. The reason it costs so much is because you aren't paying for the raw material. You're paying for a service. That service happens to be laughably bad and expensive, but that's what you're paying for.

I don't understand your contention then, as this was a response to a very specific scenario that does not happen in practice.