[jtbayly]

Shopping this way doesn't make sense though since these are list prices. How much they knock off the price for your insurance company or for the uninsured customer is necessary to shop intelligently.

Edited to add: Plus, reality is you can't really know until you get all the bills. How are they going to code the million different things they have to choose between?

I took my son to prompt care once because he had split the webbing between two of his toes and it looked to me like it needed stitches. The doc swabbed it clean and said he couldn't stitch it. He put some superglue on it and sent us home. Paying on the way out they wanted like $450. I said no. They called the manager and told him I wanted a payment plan. I said, no I don't. I want a reasonable bill. He told them to recode it. They said they had looked for a different code and couldn't find one. They looked again. They had a coworker look again. Eventually they recoded from a laceration to a cut or something like that. Dropped the price to $120ish.

(The superglue came off in less than 24 hours.)