>For emergencies I don't have time to shop.
What if you shop before the emergency?
What if you shop before the emergency?
Most of us either choose the lowest cost option on the public market that suits our needs for emergency care or take our employers options, of which there are one or two. Even if you had previously made a choice, which again is not something most people can or want to do, when an emergency happens, it’s an emergency! You will have to be taken somewhere.
There are many times when an ER is full, you are outside of your home area, maybe just traffic, that would push you to another hospital in an emergency. Your argument is not only poorly made, I find it hysterically obtuse. Most people don’t want to get to or even have to choose their damned emergency care. To assert otherwise is disingenuous
That's called buying health insurance.
And for most major health care issues, the primary concern of the patient isn't price, but rather outcomes - quality of care. Do we choose the cheapest doctor, or the doctor with the best reputation?
My wife, who is a dancer, tore her ACL last year. Not getting it fixed, and fixed right, was the difference between being able to continue dancing, and having to give up the thing she loves the most. So when decisions like "Use transplant tissue, or cadaver tissue?" came up, there was zero thought given to "Which one costs the most?" It was all "Which one is most likely to get her back on her feet and allow her to continue dancing?"
Most people in the US have never had a way of knowing who the 'cheapest' doctor is until after the bill comes.
The real financial decision isn't on price comparison, but rather whether or not to get the treatment at all. I made a cost-based decision on treatment a while back. I was being treated for an eye problem where I was at risk of permanent blindness in my right eye. Treatment involved monthly injections of a quite inexpensive drug (about $27 iirc), that was inexpensive because it was developed for other, more common conditions and had been around for a long time. My doctor wanted to try a new, specialized drug, hoping for better results. It cost $8000 a dose. With 90% coverage, I would have been paying $800/mo out of pocket. I decided to stick with the cheap drug that seemed to be working.
But that's the sort of cost difference that matters, not the "This doctor is 5% cheaper!" dream of idealized free markets.
Many people, perhaps not you, but many, would like price to be able to be one of those variables, as it is with nearly everything else in our society.
This is exacerbated by the fact that our insurance hides most of the cost variation from us anyway, and health care networks turn potentially cheaper care into probably much more expensive care. Writing this all off as "privilege" is a gross, lazy oversimplification.