It is fairly common for someone to be advised to seek emergency treatment out of precaution to ensure that a minor symptom is not indicative of a severe problem.

For example dizziness can be a completely nothing-burger inner ear problem treated with a bunch of motions from youtube, or it can be a stroke. The ER exists to make that distinction.

Part of all those logistics and resources should be used to shunt people to the correct treatment center, but liability suits and extreme profitability mean that the incentive is to treat them in the ER.

Put into other terms, if you were hospital admin incentivized on billing, and could bill someone $5k instead of $160 for a non-urgent issue, wouldn't you? The fixed costs are the same, the ER is running 24/7 with a trauma team, might as well make it profitable.

Insurance did try to deny coverage, but fortunately I appealed and won.

I feel fairly comfortable assuming that they were being seen for a minor-to-moderate burn.

Well, at least, a functioning health care system shouldn't penalize for that sort of thing. We don't really have that in the US.

I don't know either, but the broader point is that people are referred to the ED by medical professionals for seemingly minor issues all the time, and that the incentives are all lined up to treat stupid shit in the ER rather than have someone tell them to go somewhere that makes more sense.

In that case part of the treatment they received was emergency evaluation for smoke inhalation. Just because they don't end up giving you drugs or doing surgery about it doesn't mean the assessment wasn't a valuable service.

Isn't it CYA for any EMS to recommend you visiting the hospital, so they just say it to anyone. That allows them to later say that you failed to follow recommended advice.