[tivert]

> But the hospital doesn't know if the birth is going to be uncomplicated until it actually happens. If the hospital gives out only a projected price...

The hospital can totally give a realistic, projected price: It can know what the probability of a complicated birth will be, and it is also able to amortize that over all the uncomplicated births.

There's no sane public-policy reason it should be structured like a reverse slot machine: you pull the lever, get a fixed prize, then find out how much you'll pay for it.

[manfredo]

If it's a projected price, then the original commenter is still screwed if the birth becomes complicated. It's still a slot machine. Furthermore, it would incentivize sketchy practices like setting a lower base price than competitors but aggressively discovering (or manufacturing) complications so that the average price is considerably higher than the base price.

[Johnny555]

Not necessarily, it could be the hospital that gets screwed, they can eat the extra cost of the complications -- that could be factored into the base price, add X% to the bill account for the slight possibility of an unexpected complication.