Paying 40 dollars for lozenges in the ER is insane.
Right now the system has an opaque pricing structure which makes no sense.
Force hospitals to expose API's with transparent pricing.
Also, if you're looking for treatment after you're sick, that's not health insurance.
Healthy people without concerns aren't looking for treatment, they're visiting their PCP once a year.
https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-pric...
This is an impossible ask. Truly impossible. The medical care providers have spent the last 50 years or more honing the art of making costs inscrutable. Not really to make it harder for you or I to know the costs, but for the insurance companies to know the cost. 50 years is a long time, that's not just one set of workers who have done this, it's 4-6 career spans now... the first to learn it taught it to their underlings and coworkers, who invented new sophisticated techniques and bureaucracies and taught that to the third career generation, who did the same and so on.
Even if we had universal healthcare, you're not getting rid of that. It's now a culture. A transmissible, everlasting culture.
For any political ask you might come up with, absurd and difficult and even intractable as it might be, this is light years beyond that. God himself couldn't make these prices transparent.
Unless you're uninsured (which is a whole separate clusterfuck), the hospitals aren't the ones who decide how much you pay for any service - the insurance companies are. The sticker price that hospitals charge is almost meaningless and is intentionally high because it's used as the starting point for negotiations, which always bring the price down (never up). There isn't any expectation that any insurer is actually going to pay the billed amount as-is.
And I'm talking more specifically about a single entity selling to multiple customers. If two different retailers want to charge two different prices of course that's fine.
Oh yes, and patient/coverage drop rates