[kortilla]

You care about small costs but not the large ones. Even with a relatively large deductible it’s irrelevant to you if your hospital charges $50k or $90k for a surgery.

$6500 is nothing once surgery, radiation, and/or anesthesiology enters the picture.

[qgin]

Absolutely, there is room for price shopping for a subset of medical treatments. https://surgerycenterok.com is a well-known cash-pay surgery center. If you look through the procedure list, you can see the types of things that lend themselves to this model: lots of orthopedic surgeries, things that are fixes for chronic issues that don't really need to be dealt with on any specific timeframe.

But when you get into the really big, serious, time-sensitive things. Cancer treatment, heart disease, anything that starts with an ER visit... you don't really have an ability or time to "shop around". The demand is inelastic.