I had a really bad sprain about two years ago to the point where my partner had to help me on and off the toilet. Eventually I took off work, went to urgent care, and paid $200 for them to basically say "well it's not broken, we could do an MRI otherwise we don't know what you want us to do". Booking an appointment with a GP would have taken around a month. They won't be able to do anything long term but will recommend a physical therapist. All said and done it's probably a $5-10k ordeal and weeks until I could actually see any progress, plus work time missed. Big surprise, I didn't actually end up going to see a doctor. Recovery sucked and some movements still aren't quite right.
There’s nothing more quintessentially American than “not knowing how much you are going to pay for something until you owe it.” You go for a hospital visit and nobody has even a remote, order-of-magnitude idea of what you are going to pay. But you have to sign a doc right away that says “you agree to pay whatever number we eventually come up with!” And then you slowly get dozens of bills from individual doctors and hospital workers over the next 4 months. It’s absurd.
We'll make life changing decisions based on the opinion/advice of 1 individual, while shopping around on a home project or car repair that's +/- $5k.
It seems again like a combination of shortage of medical workers and the indirect nature of medical payment. If I knew up front that walking in and getting 3 medical opinions would cost me X, and I didn't need any pre-approval from insurance, or risk denials.. I'd just go do it more. But the system is so opaque that I don't know I can get those answers readily, or believe the numbers are real and won't result in random bills later.
Further, the next step after figuring out the cost of getting options would then e getting a quote for the actual resulting medical care recommends is opaque due to differing payment %s & co-pays by procedure, etc.