This is the most difficult and unacceptable part of the American healthcare “system.”

When you walk into a doctor’s office or a hospital, even with good health care coverage, you often have no idea what it’s going to cost you, and no provider can tell you because they don’t have any idea either.

The fees get worked out after your visit, by faceless people in back offices who never see patients. You get a bill, and God help you if you don’t pay it. Those faceless people will turn it over to other faceless people at collection agencies who will hound you to bankruptcy if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I just came out of 4 years of intensive healthcare management for my late father, so I know intimately of what I speak. Elderly, he had Medicare, and we paid for as much supplemental insurance as we could afford.

Yet every year, we received thousands of dollars of bills in addition to whatever his insurance covered.

None of it ever made sense, none of it was predictable, and nobody ever warned us in advance of anything.

It’s hard to imagine why we Americans accept this “system.” It does nothing more than line the pockets of private, for-profit insurance companies, management intermediaries, and healthcare chains.

When I lived in Detroit, it was hard not to notice that the headquarters of one of the largest health insurance companies in the state is a luxurious palazzo that would have been the envy of the Medici.

I noticed every time I got walloped with a bill for my dad’s life saving healthcare that I had no idea was coming and could not afford to pay without making big time sacrifices.

Our system is obscene.