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I don’t find the doctor to have any less price transparency than the mechanic?
The mechanic will have a plan for what he is going to do (e.g., "I'm going to replace your CV joint."). He will then assemble an estimate for how much that is likely to cost. He will probably even break down that estimate in terms of parts and labor. He might even provide you options for different brands of parts at different price points.
Everyone involved knows that there is some uncertainty in that estimate. They might get in there and discover that something else needs to be done, too. Usually, at that point, they will reformulate their plan, potentially with multiple options, assemble similar price estimates for those options, then contact the customer, try to explain the situation (knowing that there is an inherent knowledge gap), and ask which of the options the customer would like to take. I did this as a job long ago. There are some sketchy mechanics out there, for sure. But if you want to succeed, especially in a market where being sketchy will become 'known', you need to be very proactive in your communication with your customers, including on pricing information.
Doctors take the same exact sort of uncertainty in their work as a gospel truth that the price is "fundamentally unknowable"... and so, they just refuse to tell you. If you really press them, sometimes they'll do it, but sometimes, they just won't (and sometimes, they'll lie to you and make something up; there are sketchy mechanics everywhere). They certainly don't provide anything comparable to what the 25th percentile auto shop provides on a routine basis.
Perhaps you were thinking of a slightly different concept, that they're similar in that there is a significant information asymmetry. Customers don't necessarily know if the mechanic's plan is motivated by the car really needing whatever it is, whether it's barely justifiable and mostly a scam to increase billing, or whatever else. Similarly, patients don't always know that sort of thing with doctors; they could also be concerned that a doctor is practicing defensive medicine rather than thinking about the patient's pocketbook and giving them only what they really need. These questions are probably near impossible to estimate; I would like to believe that doctors are actually equal to or better than mechanics (the median doctor is almost certainly better than the 25th percentile mechanic if I had to guess, unlike with price transparency). In both cases, the most common solutions are to just diversify your sources of knowledge. I gave an example of how diverse those sources of knowledge can be here, but an extremely common suggestion in both domains is to just get a second opinion.
Again, I don't find it difficult to get healthcare providers to give me pricing information. I go to lower-rent(often bilingual) healthcare providers in a blue collar part of a red state, so maybe it's just different sorts of clinics.
I believe you said that you were paying up front in cash, and then getting reimbursed on your own. Probably the most likely places that are going to be top-tier in terms of price transparency are lower-rent places with cash-paying customers. They're way, way above the median. Especially when the vast majority of places get a whiff of it being insurance-involved on their side, they very quickly start with the whole "it's fundamentally unknowable" dance.
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