[notanzaiiswear]

No I am not in the US. I also don't think private insurance has to work like that.

Here in Germany "public insurance" is like that, every "medical intervention" has a code and pays a certain amount of money. Doctors usually don't tell the "publicly insured" people what stuff costs. They just do procedures and send the bill to the insurers (the public ones). They have to waste a lot of time with entering the proper codes into the computer. And sometimes they do extra procedures to earn more money.

They also often have a budget for certain procedures. If an 11th patient with a certain problem comes to their practice, they end up treating them for free.

The privately insured people get bills from the doctors and hand them over to their insurers. I assumed the privately insured people at least sometimes talk about costs with their doctors.

At the very least they get an impression of how much things cost.

I suspect a lot of complaints in the US are also from people who don't have to pay the things. They'll say "wow, they charged my xxxxx$ for THIS???", but in the end their insurer actually pays.

[msrenee]

It's nice that you think healthcare in the US works like that. I promise you that everyone I know who complains about what they are charged for healthcare is, in fact, complaining about the out-of-pocket cost. Let me know how you feel about it when you're paying $800/month for insurance and every time you use it for something that isn't routine, you spend the next month terrified not knowing what you're going to have to pay in addition. And then you get the bill. Either it's mostly covered and you pay an extra $75-$100 on top of insurance premiums or it's not and you have to figure out how to pay the bill.

You've got a very positive view of US Healthcare that doesn't seem to be rooted in experience.