Health care is the only industry where the felony laws regarding up front pricing aren't enforced. It was allowed to become a twisted regulatory nightmare where the laws were written by the industry itself utilizing kneejerk methods to obtain profit at the cost of systemic corruption.
It takes a while to realize nearly every law is anti-competition protectionism. I didn't realize it until I was working for a multinational food company and the managers were bragging about how the company lobbied for a safety bill that exactly regulated their own industry in a way that cost their competitors billions in compliance fees. They were proud of it. I was disgusted.
Disgusting, but know that there are good regulations—like environmental protections—that are frequently combatted by industry groups and tend to get weakened by the Republicans before they pass into law. Regulation can be abused by industry and corrupt politicians for anticompetitive reasons, but most of the time, it's to force companies from doing highly profitable things that aren't good for people or the planet; its much cheaper to just dump all your hazardous waste into the river, after all.
"Regulation" is not a monolith, the specific details of a particular regulation are absolutely essential to evaluating its efficacy. This tendency to suggest that all regulations are bad reflects an ignorant perspective.
This is a non-sequitur. For something like emergency care, where the choice can literally be "pay up or die", a private provider has every incentive/opportunity to charge outrageous fees. Because what are you going to do? Tell the heart attack to wait while you find another provider?
The price-opacity may be a product of regulation, but the prices themselves are free market capitalism working as intended. For another example of the same, consider the recent reporting on collusion between generic drug companies[1]. When you can't refuse to buy the product, the vendor has a ton of power to set prices as they wish.
