And commercial rates are usually set based on Medicare rates and these have not kept up with inflation.
The system is perverted to highly reimbursed elective procedures and these got put on hold during the pandemic. And there was no large honey pot the government gave hospital systems. It was all a forwarded loan. The patients and clinic filled with Covid patients put the high paid orthopedic and heart and neurosurgeons on the sidelines while hospitals paid traveling nurses and ICU docs 3 times their usual wages to have capacity to treat Covid patients. The hospital system budgets are still reeling from this situation.
The government and regulating bodies who set the relative rates for reimbursement got exposed during the pandemic. Ever since the inception of Medicare, doctors and hospitals get paid for mostly elective procedural, non intensive procedures because the body that sets the reimbursement rates and hospital payments is made up of specialists with almost no primary (think wellness) care representation.
So, if you really want to control the rise in healthcare prices, then you need to set up more competition in the marketplace instead of this quasi fixed price dance between the government, insurance companies and every Dick and Jane (medical device, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) that wants a piece of the healthcare pie. And you really may want to insist on healthcare instead of this sick care fiasco we have firmly entrenched.