[oconnor663]

I think the expectation in these situations is that the patient goes into the billing office and asks for a realistic price, and the hospitals mostly say yes. Kind of like how Verizon kept doubling my bill and then every 6 months I'd call them and ask them not to double it and they'd mostly say yes. I guess the outcome is that anyone sufficiently savvy or with savvy relatives gets out ok, and the un-savvy people get deeply, shamefully screwed.

Which is a horrible system, but it has an interesting property. The more likely someone is to complain, the more likely the system will actually work for them. To me it seems like some perverse evolved survivorship trait, for the system itself. But then I don't work in the industry, so I could be wrong about all of this.