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The doctors and hospitals are only charging that much because of a long running history of insurers otherwise not paying out.

If they charge $50, insurance will begrudgingly pay $5 if you're lucky.

So you have to charge $5000 for something fairly simple, in order to hopefully get close to $500

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This argument makes no sense. Medical bills are the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. Hospitals knowingly employ out-of-network doctors so they can bill patients huge sums directly.

Maybe some "John Q Public" meets "Man On Fire" could shake things up. The trouble with civility is the people and institutions who exploit it.

Agreed. This is a case where an unfree market has arrived at the most absurd and circuitous route to everyone getting a slice of the pie. It's crazy that a lot of Americans fight any reform of the insurance industry on the grounds that doing so would constitute socialism or an attack on the free market. What we have right now is the furthest thing from a free market. It's a set of local monopolies fixing prices, and another group (doctors) trying to get paid in a broken system.

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