How can an US doctor charge like 10 times the prices on our side of the pond ?
There’s an unspoken assumption that when doctors quote a price, the insurance companies will widdle that down to a fraction of that amount when they pay out, so if a procedure actually costs $X.00, doctors will bill the insurance for $X * Y, so insurance actually ends up paying what it actually costs.
The side effect is that we pay co-pays or deductibles or non-100% coverage amounts based on what insurance was billed, not what the procedure actually cost. It’s actually cheaper in some cases (especially with regards to medications) to not use insurance because then, we’ll get billed what it actually cost, not the grossly inflated amount, and if our coverage is only, say, 50% for a given procedure, or if we have a co-pay on medication, we end up paying less. Meanwhile we’re still paying the insurance companies for the coverage we’re not taking advantage of. The whole system is fucked beyond belief. We know it, we just can’t do anything about it.
“Vote for the politicians who want to fix it!” only works if they actually do want to fix it, and will follow through if elected.