Yes, but in this example the cost was for a consult. I bet if you called that clinic they would give you the price for a consult. People call where I work all the time and ask for the cost of different services and we tell them. Yes, in an emergency or during a hospitalization all best are off.
respectfully, I'm not sure that's true based on my experiences. When I had to see a specialist (I pasted the thread upthread - 'How to dispute a US doctor's bill') I rang in advance, because as someone else mentioned (or at least implied with the menu-in-advance analogy), I think I have a right to know in advance what I'm going to be charged. I can't do anything about the high cost of health care in this country, and I recognize that for me it's a 'first world problem' in that I'm able to afford to pay it either way, but I still just want to know - it's the principle, dammit! :)
And I was told it could be anywhere from $100 to $600, depending on how it was coded, and that there was no way of knowing the complexity of the visit in advance.
As I summarized in my other thread, they decided it was Level IV, and I (like the OP here) strongly disagreed that what I had received matched the description of Level IV. Many other Mustachians told me that they thought Level IV was a fair characterization, but when I got it reviewed after speaking to the nurse (who asked the doctor for permission for the bill specialist to recheck) they decided on second glance that it was Level III, knocking my $273 bill down to $121.
What frustrates me so much is just how opaque the whole system is, and how subjective these coding decisions seem to be, and how *of course* they are always going to err on the side of the higher/more expensive code, and in most cases we have no recourse.