> But the hospital doesn't know if the birth is going to be uncomplicated until it actually happens. If the hospital gives out only a projected price...
The hospital can totally give a realistic, projected price: It can know what the probability of a complicated birth will be, and it is also able to amortize that over all the uncomplicated births.
There's no sane public-policy reason it should be structured like a reverse slot machine: you pull the lever, get a fixed prize, then find out how much you'll pay for it.
If it's a projected price, then the original commenter is still screwed if the birth becomes complicated. It's still a slot machine. Furthermore, it would incentivize sketchy practices like setting a lower base price than competitors but aggressively discovering (or manufacturing) complications so that the average price is considerably higher than the base price.
Not necessarily, it could be the hospital that gets screwed, they can eat the extra cost of the complications -- that could be factored into the base price, add X% to the bill account for the slight possibility of an unexpected complication.
The hospital can totally give a realistic, projected price: It can know what the probability of a complicated birth will be, and it is also able to amortize that over all the uncomplicated births.
There's no sane public-policy reason it should be structured like a reverse slot machine: you pull the lever, get a fixed prize, then find out how much you'll pay for it.