Quite a story!
Medicine is now little more than big business and revenue goals and profits take precedence over patient care.
My take away was that reducing costs, increasing access and improving care to effect better patient outcomes was a much better business model than jacking up prices to maximum the market will bear and then rationing care levels and access to services.
From both a patient outcomes and revenues/ profits perspective.
Unfortunately ,our medical system seems to be going in opposite direction
The wild card here is technology and innovation.
The reason for the insane price scheduled for testing was because a few years back old tech required each test be performed individually and on separate pieces of equipment
The new technology allowed all tests in one shot on one machine but the admin suits were more concerned with maintaining their price than improving patient care and they only looked at a static analysis of the market and totally missed the opportunity from both a quality of care and revenue generation perspective of leveraging a big technological advance into better care driving greater revenue
Obama care is the ultimate example of driving costs astronomically into the far right corner and then rationing care to limit spending