I disagree with the assertion "administrative cost to the consumer is profit for the company." Anyone who has looked at customer support expense from a company's perspective knows it is a burden that the company would gladly do away with.

What was not discussed in the paper was the effect the administrative complexities have on creating a moat are health care plans. The greater the complexity, the less healthcare providers will want to associate with multiple healthcare organizations/insurance companies.

By making it possible for them to compete to the consumer on price versus quality?

Why is this not happening now? Because they hide the prices on purpose.

And when I am having a manic episode it is kind of hard for me to search for the cheapest hospital to have myself involuntarily committed.

There are just some thing capitalism really sucks at, just admit it.

Emergency care is a tiny portion of all healthcare costs.

In 2017 ED healthcare costs were $76 billion. That is about 10%.

Just go on amazon and try to buy something if you think finding the "cheapest price" would help people get healthcare.

But also, am I supposed to suffer higher prices because of my specific illness that they can charge whatever they want?

Lots of ED health care costs aren't emergency, and the reason they can charge whatever ever the want is because of special government privileges.

It's much easier to address the cost of non ED care and since it's 90% of spending, that seems like a good place to start?

Let more people compete? Remove restrictions and anti-competitive laws?

The majority of hospitals in the US are non-profit. They don't benefit from passing administrative costs to patients.

Non-profit doesn't mean that people aren't making money from it, it just means that the excess funds aren't used to drive stock growth and the organization "doesn't exist for the purpose of making money", but if the Administrators in the hospital find a way to slash the budget by $5 million there's nothing saying they can't then give themselves a raise for doing such a good job.