What is the fair price?

Internet is a fascinating place for the one who wants to find more information. Here's a person in similar situation, and some interesting comments:

dzbike writes:

Why was it so expensive? Complicated but, basically it is the fault of the insurance/medicare circus that finances health care in this country. If someone with medicare (the biggest insurer out there, who sets the benchmark that other insurers use to decide their own payment rates) walks in with a UTI and they get treated, their record goes to an office where somebody goes through the chart and tries to figure out what we did for that patient that we can bill medicare for. When their done they decide to bill medicare $3000, like the bill they gave you. Totally ridiculous number? Yes, but medicare will probably look at that bill and decide to pay $300 of that, which probably doesn't even cover our costs (it's friggen expensive to run an ED). So the OP and medicare get the same bill, but OP has to pay because they are uninsured little guy whereas medicare can say "we are only paying $300" because in an attempt to reduce costs, they've reduced reimbursement for everything, making it necessary to bill for more and more things just to cover our costs.

here's another interesting quote from riotous_jocundity :

It is insane that it could cost $3000, but not unlikely. I live in Texas too and a few years ago (when I was a broke college student without insurance) I tore my cornea on a Sunday. Everything else was closed, eye felt like it was about to fall out, so I went to the emergency room. They looked at my eye, pronounced it torn, wrote me a prescription for numbing eye drops, and sent me on my way. I was there for maybe 10 minutes. $2500 bill. I called the hospital billing number crying, and told them that I was a broke uninsured college student and that I COULD NOT PAY THE BILL and was not interested in being put on a payment plan. I told them I had $400 and that I could pay it immediately, over the phone via credit card. They said yes. In retrospect, I really should have asked for an itemized bill too, but the point is that you never just accept what the bill is--you argue and you cry and you bargain them down.

What I'm getting out of it is: when hospital bills you, the actual, fair price for procedure is somewhere in vicinity of 10-20%