&gt; Almost all of your costs are fixed: salaries, facilities, equipment. And the amount of procedures you can do with those fixed resources varies dramatically.<p>Yes it does vary dramatically, but there&#x27;s no way there&#x27;s 3 orders of magnitude of variation and definitely not 2 orders.  There might be a single order from top to bottom, a 2 hour surgery versus a 20 hour surgery or a 15 minute visit with a doctor versus a couple of hours with a doctor.<p>Lawyers have the same problem and while they do bill by the hour, they can generally give you a pretty good idea of what the more basic things might cost to handle.  I&#x27;m not suggesting that they could give you a +-3% estimate for your SCO vs IBM lawsuit, but if it&#x27;s a DUI or a will or a trust or whatever, once they&#x27;ve done it a few times they know how the game is played.<p>I totally get that people aren&#x27;t courts and doctors aren&#x27;t lawyers, but I think it&#x27;s a decent counter-example to the notion of &quot;it&#x27;s hard so why bother trying?&quot;