There's apparently some actual journalism in the latest Time magazine, both Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias cover it. First, an excerpt/summary from Drum:

Most people who come to the emergency room have no choice and no bargaining power. Hospitals can, almost literally, charge them whatever they feel like. And as Brill documents meticulously, they do. They're not eager to talk about it, either. As one hospital spokesman told Brill when he asked to see the "chargemaster" price list used to bill uninsured patients, "Most people never pay those prices....So I'm not sure why you care." Faced with an actual bill, he got annoyed: "I've told you I don't think a bill like this is relevant. Very few people actually pay those rates."

Then Yglesias:

I can see two reasonable policy conclusions to draw from this, neither of which Brill embraces. One is that Medicare should cover everyone, just as Canadian Medicare does. Taxes would be higher, but overall health care spending would be much lower since Universal Medicare could push the unit cost of services way down. The other would be to adopt all-payer rate setting rules--aka price controls--keeping the insurance market largely private, but simply pushing the prices down. Most European countries aren't single payer, but do use price controls. Even Singapore, which is often touted by U.S. conservatives as a market-oriented forced-savings alternative to a universal health insurance system relies heavily on price controls to keep costs down.

For reasons I do not understand after having read the conclusion twice, Brill rejects both of these ideas in favor of meaningless tinkering around the edges.

What neither the article nor my go-to bloggers mention is the fact that a major Republican talking point around the ACA is that the use of emergency rooms is effectively a safety net for the uninsured. And this article pretty clearly illustrates how ineffective and costly that is.