The Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt in fact has a nice series of blog posts on this topic which explain some of the quirky factors that have led hospital prices to be so economically unjustifiable.
Usually this is because manufacturers themselves have a schizophrenic attitude: they yell about it when their transistors are nice and small, but then treat the whole topic as irrelevant when their transistors happen to be lumpier than the competition's.