I agree; however the first thing he did was to order a CT scan to confirm the diagnosis and get the exact location. So the family doctor visit was thus duplicative.
Confirming the diagnosis might or might not be prudent, depending on the injury and how likely false positives are in those sorts of injuries. Confirming the exact location shortly before the surgery? That might be prudent, especially if the damage was likely to move a bit or become worse during the waiting time. This should have been explained better.
Otherwise, I'd agree that the test was unnecessary and shouldn't be done a second time. Weirdly, it could have asily been that the first test wasn't in his particular working network - I've seen this done in hospitals before (redoing tests from places not in the hospital's network). This still isn't an issue with the referral system, though, but points to other problems.
The US healthcare system is a raging river of money, and you can bet that every doctor, lab, hospital and other medical service has their buckets dipped into it. The entire system seems to be set up to squeeze as many billable office visits out of you as possible.
Otherwise, I'd agree that the test was unnecessary and shouldn't be done a second time. Weirdly, it could have asily been that the first test wasn't in his particular working network - I've seen this done in hospitals before (redoing tests from places not in the hospital's network). This still isn't an issue with the referral system, though, but points to other problems.