After working in healthcare myself for a while, I&#x27;ve always wanted to see it be a service that was paid for by the customer directly (at least hypothetically). This concept of not knowing costs would be completely unacceptable in any other industry, but it seems that people are reluctant to price things partly out of a fear of being able to do cost-benefit analysis on care and thus on human life. Direct billing would force hospitals and other care givers to be able to give cost estimates up front, and then market forces would help bring costs down as providers would compete and patients could shop around. I&#x27;m aware that this might not be optimal in all situations (eg emergency care), but runaway costs and opaque cost-benefit relationships are not helping things.<p>I remember hearing that 20% of total healthcare costs are spent in the last 2 weeks of people&#x27;s lives, and perhaps having more transparent costs would help avoid these costly, frequently unpleasant, and ineffective interventions.<p>Of course, transitioning to this would be impossible overnight, but it&#x27;s an interesting thought experiment. There would still be the option for catastrophic insurance, but otherwise it would be interesting to see market forces play a role.