To underline this, the amount of money spent on emergency care (the kind where you might not have the opportunity to get an estimate) is in the single digit percentages, and may be as low as 2%.
Those industries probably bake the cost of estimating quotes into the manpower cost already. Hospital bills would ostensibly be even higher simply to provide quotes.
But I believe his core point was up front. When your arm is off, you're not going to ask for, or even reject, a quote.
I would anticipate though that once quotes are known, and posted to glassdoor-like services, one could develop an app where you point to your arm, select "it's fallen off" and then you are provided the cheapest hospitals for your issue and their ratings.
