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Typically, with the car mechanic, the deal is that you agree on a certain amount for diagnosing, and perhaps give them a certain budget for fixing stuff. If things get more expensive, they call you so you can make an informed decision.
Also, I do not see the benefit of making people pay the actual costs of their procedure instead of the expected costs as estimated beforehand.
So, if you want to find a hospital to give birth, different hospitals could make you offers based on your health conditions and date. If they estimate that there is a 10% probability that you will need an emergency C-section, they can just add 10% of the cost of one to the offer.
This would also align incentives way better, because the hospital would only do emergency C-sections if otherwise they would run into malpractice territory. By contrast, if the hospital can just bill the additional costs to the patient, their incentives are to to an 'emergency' C-section at the first sign of troubles and then make the poor schmuck pay for it. 99% of patients will not litigate the overenthusiastic indication, and the ones that do will be dirt cheap to settle because apart from the costs of the operation, there is little in the way of damages. A scar over your abdomen might be worth a few thousand dollars, but that is basically nothing compared to a child which was oxygen deprived during birth.
Indeed, HVAC works the same way- there's an NTE amount, you have $1k(or something) to find or fix the problem. If the labor and parts amount to more than that you submit a quote. If the quote is wrong you submit another one(and the customer is very irritated, but commercial HVAC techs Are Not Known For Their Customer Service anyways). Either way, customers have an approximation.
Now the human body is more complex than air conditioners but it seems like doctors could do the same thing?
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This seems like one of the better ways of handling it, although it does demand that healthcare providers become sufficiently actuarially competent to properly forecast costs as part of their operations: maybe not great for small-time practices at a time when lots are getting bought up by larger networks as it is. For better or worse, many hospitals already have to do things like that to handle EMTALA and the fact that they can't actually expect all their patients to, you know, pay.
At my job, we write quotes by... giving a list of parts and the amount of time it'll take to install them to an admin, who tabulates the total cost. Healthcare's many problems do not include a shortage of admins.
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Yeah but this stuff always runs into the brick wall of chronic conditions and lifetime disability. Even in a universe where disability cover was confined to just exceedingly obvious issues the costs can snowball ridiculously
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