[draz]

Yes, they want more money from higher paying insurance. But if they were to officially have a menu of prices for different entities (self pay, insurance A, insurance B, etc), that'd be against the law. So they come up a "catch all" number, and they grab as much as they can get from each entity.

[maxerickson]

My point was that there is some matter of perspective in there. They could just as well offer a single price that reasonably covered their costs, but instead they are engaging in revenue maximization. So the menu is a rational tradeoff of revenue maximization and fraud avoidance, but it isn't the only one.

"Insurance companies won't play the game that way" is sort of an answer, but it isn't very satisfying.

I guess fraud statutes might benefit from some rules about the ratio between average negotiated prices and stated prices (I'm a little uncomfortable telling entities how they are allowed to price things, but large medical institutions clearly have some dysfunction in this area).