Because there is enormous opportunity for price discrimination as people are willing to spend all their disposable income to save themselves or their family.
As an ambulance chaser who looks at medical bills all day, and has an Econ degree, the complete absence of words like supply, demand, and elasticity in these conversations is disheartening.
To an extent. But it's also important to realise that a lot of mechanisms that work in other markets don't work in the healthcare market.
If I'm unconscious after a car accident, I can't get quotes from competing ambulance firms or negotiate prices.
If I'm in hospital and they say I need surgery, they can't guarantee my insurance will cover the full costs - or tell me what it'll cost me should my insurance not pay.
In any other market, we'd call people agreeing to services they didn't know the prices of fools, and people billing for services customers hadn't asked for scammers. But due to the unique nature of the healthcare industry, such things are normal.
It's frustrating to watch people say things like "corporations are greedy" and simply stop there. They've correctly identified that markets exist, wherein sellers generally price things in a way that optimizes overall profit, but seemingly don't engage with the ideas of economics, which provide a whole suite of tools and theory to with which to understand why markets act the way they do, and what to do about it.
