[mindslight]

Completely agreed. If supermarkets operated like the medical industry, you may or may not pay for your food at the checkout but then over the next year you'd get arbitrary bills from the cashier, stocking clerk, truck drivers, the busker standing outside, etc. Obviously this would destroy any semblance of a market dynamic. And lo and behold when we look at the medical industry we see complete market failure, having taken most patient agency along with it.

There have to be laws backing up this nonsensical practice of sending arbitrary and inflated post-facto bills, because if anybody else engaged in this sort of thing it would rightly be considered fraud. Such a privilege may have made sense back when the medical industry was more honest and less brazenly extractive, but at this point it's a dynamic they've set up around enthusiastically abusing. One of the main pillars of any type of healthcare reform should be getting rid of such laws, and then AGs going after any company that continues engaging in this type of billing fraud.