[mattchew]

I can't agree with this at all.

Our family has four people in it. We've spent plenty of time and money on medical care in the past 18 years. Almost everything we've done medically, we could have made use of price transparency, if we had it.

Yes, there are scenarios where the most important thing is to get emergency care as soon as possible. These are the exception--the rare exception--not the rule.

[aiisjustanif]

> The rare exception

Stop. It's not rare, 6% is not rare [1]. 10 states have 10% and above, up to 26%. Emergency room visits happen quite often enough.

[1]: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/emergency-room-vis...

[EpicEng]

rare

adjective

(of an event, situation, or condition) not occurring very often.

I'd say 6% fits that definition. You're also ignoring the fact that, for various reasons, people show up in an ER when they really didn't need to.

This helps in the vast majority of cases and you're being needlessly argumentative.

[bhelkey]

If a policy helps 94% of the time and is no better or worse 6% of the time, should we enact it?

[jjeaff]

It's definitely rare. That's 6-10% of medical visits. Which tend to be made by a minority of people visiting very often.

In fact, to use that stat per 1000 people is not very useful.

Number of people per 1000 visiting a hospital for an emergency would be more helpful.

I suspect it would be much less than even 1%.

[naasking]

> Emergency room visits happen quite often enough.

Many ER visits often happen because people can't afford insurance and preventative care. If this alleviates some of that by permitting more competition due to price transparency, then it will become even more rare.

[aiisjustanif]

1 out of 20 people get appendicitis. Appendicitis a lot of the time is handled at the ER, due to its sporadic and eminent nature.