On your first point, even if they know exactly what will be done, they can't answer. I can't look for it at the moment, but there was a Vox video maybe last year about a man who wanted to find out the cost to deliver his and his wife's baby. He called a bunch of hospitals in the area, gave them his insurance information, and he asked them the cost assuming everything goes to plan, just the cost of delivery. I don't remember exactly how long it took, but he got a number after hours on the phone. Then the bill came, and it was still a different number. The whole thing couldn't be more opaque.
It's worth noting that this isn't always a "don't know". Often it may literally be a "can't say". The problem is that even if you call them up and say "sure, I know it could be more complex, I just want to know what it would be for a perfectly normal delivery", and then you go there and get a bigger bill due to complications, what happens? Do you have a case against them for misleading you into thinking it would be cheap? Do they have written evidence that you understood their quote was only for a no-complications scenario?
The safest thing is to refuse to give an answer.
To elaborate on this, I work for a company that offers health insurance. One of the nice features of our plans is that although it's PPO with a network of contracted providers, the co-pay for someone on the plan is the same whether a doctor is in- or out-of-network. But how do you advertise that? Saying "see any doctor you want" is a non-starter, because someone might take it to mean "doctors are required to see you even if they don't want to" and then claim we misled them with the "any doctor" line. It ended up taking quite a while to work out a way to advertise that benefit without tripping over anything that might be claimed to confuse or mislead.
