<i>You can price shop if you put a great deal of effort into it.</i><p>I&#x27;m glad this worked out for you, but if one is visiting the doctor because of some symptoms, rather than visiting a technician to have a specific, prescribed, and highly standardized service (like an MRI) performed, I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;d agree that situation is different.<p>It&#x27;s simply not in the nature of medical care to have price-tags (although the situation could certainly be better that what we have in the US today).<p>I&#x27;d argue this is the case with all sorts of expertise-based services, actually - auto mechanics, lawyers, consultancies of all kinds, etc. You can&#x27;t know how much a visit to your lawyer will cost unless you know exactly what you need - but much of the time you don&#x27;t know what you need. You&#x27;re visiting the lawyer so he can figure out what you need.<p>Yet every time I see an article that involves economists pondering medical care costs, this fundamental uncertainty (at the personal level) is just elided, as if the economists never thought of that. As if they never actually deal with the health care system themselves.