NK, you and Al Franken can keep coming up with urban myths to bitch about. Meanwhile, here in the real world, including at the aforementioned court date I'd hoped to lead a field trip to, hospitals are suing people who haven't paid the "reasonable value" for the goods and services. Why isn't it just the amount billed? Because, as I'm sure you can appreciate, a creditor can't just declare a price after the fact and that becomes the price. There's no agreed-upon amount due, so the creditor is only entitled to the reasonable value of what was provided. Guess what that reasonable value is ALWAYS determined to be?
It's the amount billed, including whatever allegedly exorbitant cost for a tylenol pill you're mad about, because hospitals charge enough to cover costs and overhead, and have a formula (which leads to the chargemaster). In fact, many hospitals are non-profit entities, meaning they're charging exactly enough and often not enough to cover costs.
If you think you have the data to prove that what hospitals charge is above and beyond the reasonable value of those goods and services, you really ought to figure out a way to become a lawyer or associate with a lawyer that wants to specialize in helping people not pay their medical bills, because so far nobody else has figured it out.
Your messing up the restaurant analogy. Tipping out the help would only be at a dirty strip club where the girls are independent contractors and receive no money from an establishment. At a restaurant, your bill for food is paying for the food, the rent, the utilities, the staff, the cost of having a bunch of food on hand that may or may not be eaten, etc. Kind of like how an emergency room has to keep a shitload of stuff on hand to deal with any number of situations, even though a good chunk of it will never get used.
