[mindslight]

The problem is that we've taken on this hidden assumption that "free market" somehow means that a hospital can create an arbitrary bill for urgent care, and you have no choice but to pay it. That's not really intrinsic to the free market paradigm, but rather an orthogonal corruption pushed via the legal system.

In a different thread I pushed the lack of a contract argument, and got back a more fitting legal theory that hospitals are allowed to charge you under the idea that you not paying would be "unjust enrichment" - they treated you, incurred expenses doing so, and therefore its your responsibility to compensate them. But that still doesn't support them charging you some arbitrarily high price, rather just expecting to be reimbursed for their costs. And so such bills should actually be constrained by the lowest rate they have with contracted insurances.

As for the analogy, I've been pretty hangry to the point where I wouldn't have been able to form a contract. It was also just a more straightforward example than the overall food market still functioning even though we're all just three weeks away from starvation.

[bigwavedave]

> It was also just a more straightforward example than the overall food market still functioning even though we're all just three weeks away from starvation.

Eh, the overall food market doesn't quite fit as an analogy here. I know I'm not alone when I say I have close to a year of food storage; it's not really the same for surprise healthcare bills.

[mindslight]

There are still people who don't have such stores of food though. But sure, another example is a pedestrian with a gas can arriving at a gas station. The point is there are many things that are necessary for modern existence, yet there's a competitive market of not-completely-powerless actors keeping prices in check for the nearly-powerless ones. Healthcare is an outlier by being an extreme market failure, through both not enough regulation and too much regulation (that is to say, corruption).

(Although maybe with the rise of big surveillance and fine grained price discrimination we'll start to see these situations in other markets get exploited more)