[themagician]

With the exception of Kaiser and a few other smaller providers, pricing in healthcare is completely opaque. Consumers can't make informed decisions because they essentially have no information. In most cases if you call a provider and ask what the price of something is they can't tell you. It's a myriad of "what insurance you do have" and "it depends".

[ancap]

I would suspect that was not the case 50 years ago. There are plenty of "medical tourist" destinations where you can go to get a very complicated medical procedure done and they will tell you exactly how much it will cost before hand.

From a U.S. physician's perspective, knowing what insurance you have is obviously going to be a prerequisite to estimating the cost (unless its one of the rare doctors who accepts no insurance). Different insurances cover different things, different providers, different procedures, different prescriptions, then there's the issue of deductibles, contracted costs, etc. It's a complicated mess, and while I don't know enough about the laws affecting health insurance companies and doctors, I would suspect there are regulations which exasperate the problem. Clearly Obamacare (mandating everyone have insurance) is not going to fix the problem.