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> If we bring competition between the hospitals with price transparency, the prices will fall dramatically.

How do you envision this working for say emergency care, where as a patient you may not be in a state to make an informed decision about which hospital to visit?

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Most ER visits are not life or death situations, and most would make a 20 minute drive over a 10 minute drive if it meant saving $1k. So the incentive is still there. You can say that I'm valuing money over lives in this example, but I think we'd be picking the lesser of two evils, as it's becoming increasingly evident that socialized medicine is stacking up its own body count. Working with society is all about incentives, and universal healthcare doesn't incentivize excellence, it incentivizes complacency.

What non-emergencies typically bring you to the ED?

Sick kid during the weekend

I needed* to be stitched up at 9 PM. Urgent care could have done it, but they were closed.

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