Costs here did vary significantly for the surgery - the dirty hospital was 0.9-1.5lac (depending on general ward vs private room, etc), the place where I had it done was about 85k. It was the MRI for which the price differential was minor.
I was actually pretty surprised that the price gap was so big - I wouldn't have expected the city hospital to be almost 2x as much as the private hospital.
It seems to me that the insurance companies don't have a great incentive to lower cost of healthcare.
Insurance companies don't have a great incentive to lower the cost of their biggest expense? Um, ok.
On the surface the evidence suggests that they haven't since procedures cost so much more here than elsewhere.
The relevant counterfactual is what procedures would cost absent insurance company negotiation, not what they would cost if US patients had as few MRI's as French patients and US health care workers were paid as little as their French counterparts.