This story is revealing an important point about the health care system, but it only tells half the story. The other part of how broken the system is, and why pricing varies so wildly, is due to bad faith negotiations on the insurers' side.<p>Many insurers negotiate with a hospital by saying: "We are only going to pay 25% any bill you send us." If the hospital doesn't play ball, the insurer kicks them out of their network, and effectively denies the hospital customers. The hospitals that can't afford to lose those customers is incentivized to quadruple their prices just to get the insurer to cover their costs.<p>However, if a second insurer comes along and negotiates the same way, but says they'll only pay 50% of the hospital's stated cost, the hospital makes a tidy profit on the insurer's dime. (Remember: quoted price = 4 * cost. If insurer pays (quoted price * 0.5), then the hospital makes a 100% profit on that insurance transaction.)<p>What's been created is effectively an endless positive feedback loop to negotiate prices upwards, fueled by rampant information asymmetry and profit motive.<p>We <i>desperately</i> need some kind of government intervention against this in the US. I'm convinced that single payer would fix this in a fucking jiffy.