Lee, I think you are allowed to tell your mom anything you want.
ita and other hospital-ly types, have you seen the state hospital chargemasters before? They detail in an excel spreadsheet all the billables for a given hospital. (For example, at Huntington a 4% Cocaine solution (!!!) is $149.... Grace's trache tubes are $330+ each, a day in the NICU is over $5000).
kat, I worked at Mass General, until Ben was born. I was a systems coordinator (sort of a liaison between Finance and Information Resources). One of my responsibilities was to maintain various tables, including the hospital charge master. Ours had a lot more fields, than the sample one I downloaded at that site -- same idea, though. Procedure/item/service name; price; revenue code. (Also HCPCS codes and a bunch of other stuff nobody will care about). I couldn't get over the prices, then (and that was 1996). If I recall, correctly, printed out, it was between 2 and 3 reams of paper, small font, double sided, landscape oriented. I had to get monthly dumps in various sorts, because although I maintained it, I couldn't then access it online, or on our hospital computer.
Working in the hospital made me convinced single payer gov't run insurance is the only way. Every insurer has its own rules about how to bill, so the money we spent just trying to figure out and obey those rules (which they don't really want you to figure out, because if you figure them out and bill properly, they have to pay) was ridiculous.
In my opinion, pricing is all a shell game. Healthcare providers will moan about Medicare reimbursement rates, but Medicare is the payer who butters most of their bread.