Sometimes worse; because they take your money upfront and won’t even tell you what coverage you are actually buying…
That said, though, while insurance companies are total scumweasels and should be burned to the ground, part of their persistence is derived from the fact that you (without having arm-twisting power on par with a large medical insurance company) simply cannot get prices, much less the best ones, for all sorts of medical procedures.
Insurance, as a risk-pooling thing for catastrophically expensive happenings would still be a thing; but bringing insurers (and their profit margins) into routine medicine, where almost no risk pooling takes place, is supported largely by the fact that it’s so difficult to even touch anything more serious than a bottle of cough syrup at the corner pharmacy without being handed a cryptically semi-itemized and shockingly large bill that turns out to bear almost no relation to reality.
