[onphonenow]

It's two sided.

The people getting service often are not ones actually paying (insurance pays, medicaid, medi-Cal etc).

The whole billing thing can be pretty darn maddening for providers as well.

There is absolutely no public pricing.

One thing I couldn't stand. A bunch of policians want to talk about how much money various govt programs save. So they do things like lower of cost or contract (penalizes you if you deliver to much service for same price) or some % of your charge sheet (ie, 50%). If 90% of your patient load is going through these programs, you basically have to set your cash pay charge to 2x it's normal cost, so that all these players can then report "savings".

The reality is there should be a cash pay DISCOUNT, you pay 80% if you pay in cash. But all these programs will not pay more than cash pay even though the overhead of dealing with them is massive. Ie, probably should pay 110% of a reasonable rate.