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There was a wild post on r/RealEstate yesterday. It's already been deleted.
There's obviously a good chance that it's a totally fake story. I'd basically assume that it is. I don't even really care if there's even a 0.1% chance that it's actually true; it doesn't really matter.
Part of the reason why people likely believe that it's fake is that it sounds like absolutely outrageous behavior by the contractor. Something that no one would put up with. Something that would shock the conscience if it actually happened and there was a recording of the interaction or something.
So what's weird is that this is the standard modus operandi in the medical industry. It's just the way things are done. Yes, if you have insurance, then instead of telling you to your face that they're charging a ridiculous made up number after the fact, they tell your insurance provider the same thing. But the basic fact pattern is absolutely the same.
I'm definitely not going to go all Kulak and say that since this routinized obscenity shocks the conscious, everyone needs to start going around murderin'. But it absolutely is a routinized obscenity that should shock the conscience. Perhaps my crazy pills are significantly less potent than his, but they appear to still be crazy pills.
Lawyers can debate the legalese of "consent to treat" forms and what they do and do not allow, but it simply cannot be plausible that we will have a functional medical industry when it is the one and only industry that is allowed to simply refuse to provide you a price prior to authorizing work and then go on to just make up whatever the hell inflated price they want after the fact.
As a kid, I knew someone who was sued for torrenting (or their parents were) a movie of some kind. The initial fee for settlement (especially after late fees etc were added in) was insanely high, but the parents dragged it out and eventually settled for cents on the dollar. So much stuff is like this, the perpetrators rely on occasionally encountering people who are the perfect combination of rich, dumb and neurotic/anxious to just pay immediately. Even if it’s only 5% of people, it’s more than worth it. Debt collection has worked this way for millennia.
Yeah, there are many scams where the scammer isn't actually doing anything illegal, they're just relying on people's anxiety with saying, "no, fuck off". All the way down to beggars trying to guilt people into giving them money for gas with a ridiculous sob story, all the way up to patent-trolling and blackmail. For the party being harassed, there is both the cost-benefit analysis of what it takes to get your harasser to go away to the skillfully crafted guilt or anxiety inducing attack on their conscience.
As an addendum, one small thing that I really hate about this is how developing the hardened shell of being quick to tell people to fuck off subverts judgment and charitable behavior towards people. Years ago, maybe about a decade now, an indigent looking man in a wheelchair tried to stop my wife and I on the sidewalk. I ignored him on the basis that he was almost certainly trying to get money. My wife stopped; it turned out all he wanted for someone to pick up his lighter that he'd dropped (there was no add-on begging, he thanked her kindly and everyone went about their day). I felt bad about that and still do, but my alternative would be hearing approximately 38 bullshit stories that end in, "so I need $20" for every one disabled guy that just needs a hand with something real quick.
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I hate to say it, but people probably shouldn't torrent movies or other IP. The analogy there would be more if this contractor's truck was in the street, maybe he was working on a neighbors house, and the redditor went and swiped a few screws from it. Then, when the contractor noticed, he threatened to sue the guy for OneBillionDollars.jpg. Like, okay, buddy. Silly, yes. But kind of different in kind. Perhaps one could make other analogies to try to make it somewhat more sympathetic, like if the contractor was working on the neighbor's house, and the neighbor swiped the screws and gave them to the redditor. I get that there are complications here, but I think it's really just a different type of thing.
Debt collection should mostly be premised on the validity of a previously-agreed-upon debt. That's usually the first line of defense - "Prove that I owe this debt." When done above-board, the debt collector can produce a document that the debtor signed that specifically authorized the terms of the debt. Things get sketchier as the underlying facts get sketchier. Usually, how sketchy it gets depends on how sketchy the original transaction was. The extreme end of sketchy for underlying debts would be, "We refused to give them a price, just did the service, and then unilaterally made up a price." (Yeah, I guess even more extreme would be that they just didn't even do the service or just totally made up the whole thing, but that would probably be better categorized as obvious outright fraud rather than "sketchy".) I guess if the conclusion is that routine practice in the medical industry is akin to the sketchiest versions of underlying debts that are claimed by debt collectors, that's damning with faint praise.
There is some magic that occurs in debt collection. You can go through more and more layers additional sketchiness and eventually they just call it taxation.
A debt that is owed to "society" because you were born here. Services were sometimes rendered before you were born, and the debt is still being paid off. You get voice in what services are offered via voting, but if you don't vote you still owe money. And a candidate can lie about what they'll charge you to get your vote and suffer no consequences.
Any attempt to make these comparisons through a metaphor just make it sound like you are talking about a criminal syndicate.
And in case you didn't feel like you were taking crazy pills a majority of people think that this is a better and more fair way to pay for medicine.
Well, yeah. Organized crime is easier to deal with than disorganized crime.
That said, I wouldn't be against some of the proposals in this thread for laws forcing price transparency, since as another poster pointed out, veterinarians are able to do this, so there should be no reason human doctors or surgeons can't.
Organized crime is easier to deal with than disorganized crime until a point, at which point it becomes completely entangled with the state to the point of being either coup-complete or requiring intercession by some faraway as yet un-completely-corrupted power, as happened during the Italian anti-mafia campaigns where Rome was still able to exert some pressure on the completely corrupted Sicilian political system.
The US is lucky in a way in that mafias have been local enough and ethnic enough that control of institutions has been relatively limited and temporal.
The US has a comparatively unusual system where the Mafia became an arm of the state rather than the other way around.
More common than you think. Look at the relationship in Russia, or how the Yakuza used to assist the Japanese Government (they fell out after a government official was murdered and now the Yakuza is a shadow of what it was. But I heard that a lot of COVID restrictions were informally enforced by the Yakuza).
That would be surprising since I've heard that the great majority of Yakuza members are over 50 now.
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