The Feb 20th issue of Time Magazine included an exposé on the practices of hospitals billing off of "chargemasters", which are inscrutable, unsupportable list pricing schemes that hospital administrators themselves are loath to even mention.
Hospitals claim the chargemasters are irrelevant because they negotiate prices with insurance companies at a discount to these list prices. But those who are uninsured or are underinsured are asked to pay list prices.
Chargemaster prices are uniformly outrageous and are billed at hundreds and sometimes thousands of percentage points higher than the cost to deliver that medicine, service, or procedure. If hospitals billed starting with Medicare rates and marked up, it would normalize the marketplace and lower the total cost of healthcare.