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The "high price," I suppose, is the reduction in private practice physicians. Since the article provides no evidence that private practice is superior (for society) to hospital practice, I'm left unable to assess whether this is in fact a "high price" at all.

Presumably this is not accidental but is instead a manifestation of an intentional policy. The details of this policy are left unaddressed by the article, as are its pros and cons.

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The article is pretty clear that the "high price" is that the same procedure performed by the same doctor is often billed at a much higher rate when the doctor is an employee of a hospital instead of a self-employed physician.

No. It seems that hospitals are paid on a per-patient basis while individual doctors are paid on a per-procedure basis. Unless I misunderstood the article.

This is not the case, hospitals are also paid per-procedure.

The article is pretty clear about what the author considers to be the price: doctors are less able to give personal treatment and more likely to burn out and want to retire as early as they can. (Whether you agree is another question, but the article does provide this evidence.)

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