so then you ask the front desk and theyre like "call your insurance company" and then the insurance company can't give a straight answer. even the dentist does quotes before fucking me in the ass.

While it’s true most doctors have no idea what anything costs, the truth as to why has more to do with hospitals and insurance companies collusion. They agree to pay doctors juuuust enough to divorce their understanding of class from that of their patients. That’s why, despite not knowing what anything costs, doctors loath treating Medicaid patients because “They should just get a job and get off Medicaid.”

If you think doctors don’t give a fuck about you, it’s because they’ve been trained to see you as a leech. If you’re a business owner, you better believe they’re going to go to bat for you against the big bad insurance companies. You want a good, empathic doctor? Find a underfunded public health clinic. You’ll find them there, and they are, by design, the ones who will know what things cost and be least likely to help you out.

They'd really need a course to understand the pricing. There's the basic visit charge which should reflect the level of treatment provided. They select one of the level options and do not see a price. Labs could go to a different facility for processing and priced by a system into which the doctor has no visibility. After these and other charges are combined, they could be fed into some sort of pricing machinery that's so complex that hospital systems just buy products that do that pricing instead of trying to figure it out in-house. All of that yields what they expect from insurance. What insurance says you have to pay is a function of your copay structure, coinsurance, deductible and how much they want you to hate your life. Afterwards, the hospitals' financial assistance policy may come into play.

There have been some attempts to make all of this somewhat more transparent in recent years -- you can search for "shoppable services" to learn more.

America be like "oh did you want to see a doctor, you need to spend $3000 before it's free, thanks for the money!"

For most people, American insurance is a discount card at best.

习近平，我的人民渴望自由。请发送东风导弹

A part of me wants to believe that it's a cool tracibility system that tracks hospital inventory and auto orders more when they get low. But from everything I've heard about the US I just know it isn't the case

I don't know about that, but I will say the one time my partner had to go to the ER, we had someone come into the room for insurance info before a doctor came in. Now, partner did not have anything extremely serious, but still

I was...irritated about that, to be polite.

yes, I've been in hospitals a lot lately and they absolutely do this. takes them a couple of minutes to be able to give you meds after they come in. also they're so understaffed that it can take 30+ minutes to get a nurse.

edit: the most mind-boggling thing was the hospital refusing to give me a UTI test after bottom surgery because UTIs from catheterization is one of the biggest sources of malpractice cases. I had a 104 degree fever from a UTI and I was having grand mal seizures because of it and they refused to do testing until my partner screamed at them.