Is that anything more than noise?

Assuming you have a reasonable doctor and let yourself be guided by his recommendations, your bump-on-the-head visits are going to be an hour of you waiting in the waiting room, and five minutes of a nurse taking your blood pressure and the doctor asking you a couple of questions. Billing their time at $240 / hour, you've used up $20 of medical resources, plus a few bucks for the gloves and popsicle sticks they use during the exam.

If every man, woman, and child in the US went into the doctor every month for a bump or a cough, the total cost would be significant in absolute terms -- $72 billion -- but insignificant in the grand scheme of things; $72 billion is less than 3% of current US healthcare spending.

Fine. Sure, you bump your head or get a sore throat, you walk it off.

What happens when you try to "walk off" something you think is minor, and you're in the ER 24-72 hours later? Hello $20K-$50K bill.

My wife and I were in a car accident a year ago (someone turned in front of us while we were doing 40mph). My wife required an ambulance for transportation due to damage to her right foot. The ambulance didn't exactly let us compare prices and pick which hospital to go to.

That's what insurance is for. Catastrophic situations. Or perhaps there's a way to pre-purchase emergency care at a discount. Or you set your emergency provider ahead of time based on price. I don't know. There must be creative ways to solve this problem rather than being all fatalist about it.

Most of those "creative solutions" are made by people who, to be frank, really have no idea what they're talking about.

If I get into a car accident, or if my intestine ruptures, do you think I want the person on the other end of 911 to have to deal with which ambulance provider I picked out or which ER I have on my list of approved locations? No. I want the closest ambulance to take me to the closest ER, and I want the first doctor available to take a look at me. Then, if need be, I want the first ER room open.

Counterpoint: At the time, we had insurance. Great insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield. Also, had State Farm for auto. Our medical policy on our auto policy was exhausted solely from the hospital visit and ambulance ride, and the other at-fault party's coverage (also State Farm) barely covered the first few doctor visits for my wife.

I've now had to pay several thousand dollars out of pocket for my wife's physical therapy, MRIs, and prosthetics, and have been told I will need to sue State Farm to recoup my out of pocket expenses.

I'm deeply sorry for what you had to endure, and I didn't mean to trivialize your situation.

No need to be sorry. I just wanted to demonstrate that even with insurance, healthcare is hard.

I'm not saying it is easy (it often isn't) but government provided accident insurance is provided to all (visitors included) within New Zealand. It provides medical cover and compensation for accidents for pretty much all situations. Wen you have a straight forward accident all is easy and it just works. The trouble arrives when you try to define accident or your injury was difficult to pin point. Botched operation? You might be covered. Infected mosquito bite? Not an accident, not covered. Infected insect bite? Accident, you're covered! Swallowed a chunk of glass? Accident IF it caused injury. No swallowed foreign body is classed as an injury unless it caused damage. Administering and defining this crap must often cost more than just paying out would. If you're filling out the paperwork, be very careful to write as little as possible and use the broadest terms possible.