Oh yes they do. I've got "good" insurance and have such fun when I get a surprise bill for $150 for talking to a specialist for 15 minutes when I thought it would be a $25 copay under my plan. Costs a couple grand if I end up in the hospital. $25 every time I see a doctor. That adds up when it takes 4 visits over 2 weeks to figure out what the problem is and what medication I need. And the insurance itself isn't cheap.
Why don't you know the costs upfront? "Socialist insurance" doesn't automatically cover everything you want or need, by the way. Rather, there is a government mandated list of things that are covered.
There are presumably different types of private insurances, sometimes it makes sense to agree on "self pay" for small amounts, sometimes it doesn't.
Also if "socialist insurance" would cover your 15 minute talk, you would never know it cost 150$. You would just wonder after a while why the health care system always seems to be on the brink of collapse.
Are you in the US? Not knowing the cost of a doctor visit until you see the bill is a ubiquitous problem with health insurance. Every time I need something besides a basic visit to a doctor I've seen before, I call my insurance company. I navigate the automated menu, trying to figure out how to talk to a human or press 0 repeatedly until the system gives in and connects me to someone. Then I try to explain what I need done, going back and forth with the employee for 10 minutes trying to figure out if we're talking about the same thing. They tell me that if the doctor's office bills it using this particular code, it will cost $x. If they use this other code, it will cost $y. It will probably be covered if these exact parameters are met, but the insurance representative can't guarantee that it will be covered and they can't guarantee that this is what it will cost and I'll just have to try to explain all this to the front desk at the doctor's office and again to the nurse and again to the doctor and hope everything aligns and I don't wind up on the hook for an extra hundred dollars when the bill shows up.
You can try to tell me that this is the only way medicine can be profitable and continue to function, but there are so many middle men and CEOs getting paid to do nothing but make things more complicated and more expensive that I struggle to believe that.
No I am not in the US. I also don't think private insurance has to work like that.
Here in Germany "public insurance" is like that, every "medical intervention" has a code and pays a certain amount of money. Doctors usually don't tell the "publicly insured" people what stuff costs. They just do procedures and send the bill to the insurers (the public ones). They have to waste a lot of time with entering the proper codes into the computer. And sometimes they do extra procedures to earn more money.
They also often have a budget for certain procedures. If an 11th patient with a certain problem comes to their practice, they end up treating them for free.
The privately insured people get bills from the doctors and hand them over to their insurers. I assumed the privately insured people at least sometimes talk about costs with their doctors.
At the very least they get an impression of how much things cost.
I suspect a lot of complaints in the US are also from people who don't have to pay the things. They'll say "wow, they charged my xxxxx$ for THIS???", but in the end their insurer actually pays.
It's nice that you think healthcare in the US works like that. I promise you that everyone I know who complains about what they are charged for healthcare is, in fact, complaining about the out-of-pocket cost. Let me know how you feel about it when you're paying $800/month for insurance and every time you use it for something that isn't routine, you spend the next month terrified not knowing what you're going to have to pay in addition. And then you get the bill. Either it's mostly covered and you pay an extra $75-$100 on top of insurance premiums or it's not and you have to figure out how to pay the bill.
You've got a very positive view of US Healthcare that doesn't seem to be rooted in experience.
I'm not in the US, but afaik they provide the best medical care in the world.
Socialist restrictions of course also exist in "socialist" systems like here in Germany. There also seems to be a constant shortage of workers in health care.
