A North Dakota woman killed herself and her three children earlier this year over unpaid medical bills, according to CBS News. In New York, The New York Times reported in May, a taxi driver took his own life upon finding himself unable to pay for major expenses, including his wife’s medical bills after she was diagnosed with cancer.

Hospital bills and health care overall is insanely overpriced in the United States. A father took his daughter to the emergency room in 2015 and left with only a Band-Aid on her finger; a $629 bill came in the mail a few weeks later, Vox reported. The following year, Vox wrote, a 3-year-old girl’s 30-minute MRI cost her parents $23,795.47, with their insurance picking up only $1,547.23 of the initial $25,000 price tag.

A 30-minute MRI costs $503 in Switzerland and $215 in Australia. You can find a 20-count box of Band-Aid Flexible Tough Strips for $2.52 at Target. Looking at these numbers, it’s obvious that hospitals are overcharging their patients. But why?

Every hospital has a giant list detailing the provided services and their costs. It’s called the “chargemaster.” Each item and service has its own code and, as a patient goes through a hospital visit, he or she is charged for every item they touch, from the ibuprofen to the IV. At the end of the visit, all of the codes go onto a claim, which is sent to the patient’s insurance company. The insurance pays for a portion of the bill as per the patient’s policy, and then sends the rest to the patient.

There’s a glaring issue with the chargemaster: every hospital has its own. As a result, prices vary and are high and unpredictable. A service can cost an outlandish amount of money at one hospital and a fairer amount at another.

For instance, New Choice Health estimates that an echocardiogram—an ultrasound for one’s heart, put simply—ranges in price from $490 to $1,100 at the Hospital of Central Connecticut in New Britain; at the University of Connecticut’s John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington, the cost ranges from $1,150 to $2,475. A “great price” for an EKG, the website states, should be $430. Quite the spike these hospitals charge, huh?

To make matters worse, it’s almost impossible to find out what a bill will amount to before, during or after a hospital visit. The prices aren’t listed in the same manner that prices of cars or coffee makers are.

Phone calls to hospitals asking for answers will most likely be met with reluctance or a complete lack of assistance, as exhibited by Vox reporter Johnny Harris’ experience of trying to find out what the cost of his son’s birth would cost. It took Harris over a month and many calls to multiple hospitals to get even a single estimate which, by the way, ended up way wrong, as he and his wife paid more than what he was told they’d have to dish out.

The chargemaster and its inflated prices don’t serve to get patients the best price for the best care. Its purpose is to make a profit off of the patient; hospitals wildly increase prices so that, even after the insurance discount, they still make money. Don’t have insurance? Prepare to have your wages garnished.

There’s no end in sight to this. The U.S. government fights on how to help patients pay the bill rather than questioning why the bill is so insane. For example, the Affordable Care Act reduced the price of medical services to consumers, but it didn’t reduce the actual unit price.

And just like in the case of the North Dakota mom and the New York taxi driver, that means people would rather die than pay for services that would keep them alive.