[droithomme]

Thanks for that link! For non-urgent routine care I have a local doctor. I was going to recommend to you a2zimaging, which was a service I used for discount MRIs using unused capacity nationwide, but I see just now they've gone defunct in the last year or so. They used to have MRI scans for $250-$500 depending on state. This was less than the over $10,000 I was quoted without. I seems there's other services claiming to do something similar now but I have no experience with them.

I've also paid cash at old specialists who don't accept Medicare, and traveled to Mexico for care. I've also gotten superb care while overseas. Single payer is probably the answer. If I need serious surgery some day I will likely do it in India. Your site there seems a reasonable alternative I would look into.

But this still leaves open the situations with a serious accident requiring immediate care which would surely bankrupt anyone. Insurance never covers whatever care is nearest to a random accident site, and this scheme is by design, along with the curious situation where each hospital and their staff are carefully partitioned out to different networks.