> I wouldn't say a surgery could be considered routine until it's complete. That's hindsight bias.

Ehhhh, not if said surgery has a really high success rate and a really low rate of additional complications. There's all sorts of surgeries--say, LASIK eye surgery--that have a 99%+ success rate. And actually, LASIK is a great example of an operation that has lots of price transparency, competition, and where folks have the time to shop around, and it's fairly cheap as a result (~$2-3k per eye).

We can do this with more in the healthcare industry.