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Notes -
I've only been skimming this conversation, but I'm pretty sure he's asking for pretty specific numbers. Speculating on his motives would probably be better left off until you can say which numbers he's asking for.
Over the course of this conversation it's moved around a bit, it's been both price as in cost and price as in charge, although he also added reimbursed rate at some point. In the situation we are talking about (planned procedures covered by insurance) neither of those numbers matter to the patient and the price as in charge is pretty firmly unrelated to the reimbursed rate as well as the price as in cost (since determining the actual cost is hideously complicated in the hospital and rarely relevant given it poorly related to what private and public insurers actually pay). The numbers are pretty much all made up as part of some weird dance between the hospital, government, and insurance. This is suboptimal but is the current state.
Hospital finances typically involve extracting as much money from the few parts of healthcare delivery that are actually profitable so that you can fund unprofitable portions of the hospital. Naively this sounds bad but when you consider things like the fact that the ED loses money because a sizable portion of the care it delivers is functionally free (the uninsured who can't pay)...well the alternative is worse because it involves people with no insurance or unknown insurance status just dying instead.
Just for a check, I counted nine comments where I asked for the same specific numbers and zero comments where I asked for any other specific numbers.
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