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> 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.

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.

Something your comment overlooked is the overall availability and the required timeline for something health related is usually quite different than home maintenance or car troubles.

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.

In an ideal world, what would you say should have happened?

Instead of being blown off and told "I don't know what you want us to do" after being triaged, some helpful direction on next steps I can take would have been nice. Something like "Yes, we can do an MRI but that'll be expensive. We can make an appointment for you for physical therapy. Also here's some minimal tips we have to make recovery a bit better." It's a sprain, I imagine that's pretty common, but most people don't know what to do. To be shuffled out as soon as possible seems pretty irresponsible to me.

My go-to question isn’t “should I do X” but more like “would you do X if this was you” - with good providers it gets closer to the heart of the matter.