Not really. The law you're referring to is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which only applies for childbirth and "serious health conditions". Most things you can shop around for also aren't serious enough to qualify, so you're not entitled to such unpaid sick leave.
But also, it's kinda a moot point because laws like that only apply to people that know them or can afford an attourney. Just like the person in the linked article didn't know she couldn't be harassed quarterly by the court system (rather, just yearly) due to being disabled, those who are most in need of that law are unlikely to know about it nor to have an attourney.
> If it costs $1000 in travel and inconvenience to fly to another city for a procedure then people won't use a local hospital that tries to charge $10,000 more
This assumes that people have both perfect knowledge of their procedure and the prices of all hospitals, and that people value money over convenience.
I know for a fact that I can fly to another country with free healthcare and get a procedure for cheaper than I can get it in the US, but hardly anyone does that regardless. It's just too inconvenient.
I also know for a fact that people rarely have even decent knowledge. Plenty of people buy incredibly overpriced cell-phone plans or internet. The free market hasn't been able to get those prices anywhere close what they should be even though people can switch providers, compare prices, and aren't stressed about their health.
But now you're not making an argument for socialized medicine, you're just making an argument for requiring unpaid sick leave for a scheduled medical procedure.
> But also, it's kinda a moot point because laws like that only apply to people that know them or can afford an attourney.
Are there many laws that don't work this way? Would the same people be any better off if the government would pay for their medical procedure but they didn't get it because they didn't know that?
> This assumes that people have both perfect knowledge of their procedure and the prices of all hospitals
Which is the point of requiring price transparency. Your doctor should provide you with a list of all the places that can do the procedure along with their locations and prices and any other information useful to choose between them.
> and that people value money over convenience.
But that is the mechanism by which it operates -- there is a point where the money is worth more than the convenience, and once people actually know the amount of money required, that limits how much providers can overcharge because past that the inconvenience is less than paying the money.
There is nothing wrong with choosing convenience. It's the thing that allows trade offs between price and convenience to exist. Maybe the clinic near the big city will always have the best price because it has the most patients to amortize fixed costs over, so the rural clinic can only stay in business by charging more per patient. If the higher price is worth not having to travel to the city -- and people know that -- then people will choose to patronize it, which is how we know its value exceeds its costs. If everybody chooses to travel to the city for the lower price then we know the rural clinic costs more than it's worth, which is the same mechanism that causes it to fold.
> I know for a fact that I can fly to another country with free healthcare and get a procedure for cheaper than I can get it in the US, but hardly anyone does that regardless. It's just too inconvenient.
Because flying to another country is very inconvenient, and not at all inexpensive on its own. So the limit it places on overcharging is not very strict. Especially when you don't actually know how much you'll be charged, so you don't even realize that it would have been worth it to do that until after it's already done.
The inconvenience is much less to go to another town than another country, so that would provide a much lower limit on how much anyone can overcharge before people would do that. If they were actually provided with the price differences -- so why aren't we doing that?
Federal law requires employers to provide at least unpaid sick leave. That caps the premium a local hospital can charge over competitors at the loss of the day's wages and the travel costs, which are both dwarfed by the amount of money in medical expenses we're comparing them to for these bankruptcy-inducing procedures.
> Not to mention that requires every hospital to offer every service and to have every type of specialist for every type of disease.
Why would it require that? There are thousands of hospitals in the US. You don't need every hospital to do everything as long as there is some competition for any given thing.
And far away hospitals can provide competition even if people don't actually use them in practice. If it costs $1000 in travel and inconvenience to fly to another city for a procedure then people won't use a local hospital that tries to charge $10,000 more, so they charge only $900 more because it's all they can get away with. But that's only if there's price transparency -- if you can't find out ahead of time that it costs $10,000 more for the local hospital then people choose it anyway and there is no incentive for them to lower their prices, which is where we are now.
> You can't just walk into a hospital and choose between Name Brand MRI or Store Brand MRI. It requires a level of knowledge that most people don't have. It's knowledge I don't have! And something I'd prefer to never have to think about when I have other shit to deal with in real life.
And that option exists -- you buy an expansive low deductible insurance plan that covers everything. That necessarily comes at the cost of very high premiums, because it has to cover the cost of making you price-insensitive.
You can also buy a less expensive insurance plan that doesn't cover everything and then consider anything it doesn't cover as unavailable. That's what socialized systems generally do, because they do make people price-insensitive but still have budgetary requirements to meet. But there's no reason you can't get a private plan that does that either; just don't object when it doesn't cover everything. You pay for what you get, one way or another.
> Your analogy falls apart because the government does make mandates for cars. Things like safety features.
They also have mandates for medicine. There is a whole medical licensing system. That's independent from who pays for it.
> When you're looking for a car, you have some properties of a car which are easily understandable. When you're searching for medical assistance, most people only vaguely know what's actually wrong.
I don't see how it's different. There are plenty of subtleties when buying anything expensive that aren't readily apparent, like that car insurance can be more than the car payment, or that some models depreciate faster than others so you have to account for future resale value, or that some models have more frequent repairs, or more expensive repairs. Some people buy based on style and only later find out through experience the total cost of ownership is $40,000 higher than they expected.
It's the same thing with healthcare, but it's the same thing with healthcare either way. Regardless of who is paying, which doctor has the best patient outcomes? Which medication is more effective? What clinical trials are there for your condition? You can ask your doctor, but first you have to choose your doctor. And then, in the end, they only advise you what to do. It's still your decision and your life.