I'm sure we'd love to hear them.

As an example from an outsider's perspective:

I had shoulder surgery about 4 years ago. Outpatient arthroscopic surgery, so I was in and out of the hospital in about 4 hours. No real complications of any kind. The bills were $45,000. Sure, insurance reduced and covered a lot of that, but the bills were still $45,000.

Doing some math, that's $11,250 for one patient-hour, or $270,000 for one patient-day.

Lewis-Gale in the NRV shows they had 14,431 patient-days last year. So in theory, that's about $3.9B in billable services...or almost twice the cost of operating a US Navy aircraft carrier. And that is not a very big hospital.

I would genuinely love to hear where the delusions of healthcare billing come from. In every other arena, customer charges are some combination of what it costs to provide the service and what the customer is willing to pay. Healthcare doesn't seem to benchmark off either of those things.