More on health insurance

Here is some more detail on the health system, which probably explains the huge discounts we seem to get when paying ourselves upfront.
What apparently happens with costs is that the Dr passes on a bill to the insurance, then the insurance says, I'm not paying that much, I'll pay you this much (a much smaller amount). So, necessity being the mother of many things, the Dr inflates bill by certain percentage, in order to get paid what is a reasonable amount to cover costs (assuming Dr is not also inflating costs to pay for yacht parking here).
Hence, we got a bill for $250 from a certain health professional. But when Steve rang up and she realised that he was just ringing to pay (not to give insurance details) our charge was $85.

Another thing I realised recently is that everything costs money, which means, if you get a rescue helicopter ride, you get a bill for that too. Congratulations, you're alive, now here is our bill...So when you read about people setting up Go Fund Me pages to get some extra money to cover medical costs, and then they raise $20K, they're not making a profit.