I am deeply offended by your allegation. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a shill. I would not make the same accusations about you, nor would I act as if I can estimate the probability that you are. HN's commentary guidelines address this.

You can consider my mistake to be in conceptualizing the cost of "medical services" too narrowly, as just the medicine, and not the providers' surrounding administration. To that end I take your point. In theory, at least. Do you know how much this has? In particular, you refer to the back-and forth negotiation of claims--on what do you base this claim?

> I am deeply offended by your allegation.

Be offended all you want. It's a free country, but, to be perfectly frank, you are still making it difficult to believe you are writing in good faith, as I will show.

> You can consider my mistake to be in conceptualizing the cost of "medical services" too narrowly, as just the medicine, and not the providers' surrounding administration.

Which is fine, except that my very first comment that you responded to explicitly explained "More direct costs, more costs at the provider they have to cover..."

So I already explained that which you said you missed, before your first comment questioning it.

> Do you know how much this has? In particular, you refer to the back-and forth negotiation of claims--on what do you base this claim?

When I wrote "You asked this question 30 minutes after even a casual reading of my other comment, and a little thinking about it, would have fully answered it." I was serious.

You still asking this question, instead of looking at that comment, indicates that at best you are completely unserious. For your edification, here is a link to that comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480873

When you wrote your first comment in reply to mine, there were already two comments there -- that one and its very short parent.