This is absurd. Look at the cost escalations over time. Were ER’s not well equipped ten years ago? No they have just ratcheted up the cost because they can. Con

This is absurd. Look at the cost escalations over time. Were ER’s not well equipped ten years ago? No they have just ratcheted up the cost because they can. Consider that, given their bargaining position, wouldn’t it be a surprise if they didn’t take advantage of it? What’s holding them back from shaking everybody down for as much as they can? Morals? Lol. Just because the hospital has a bunch of equipment and training doesn’t mean it’s efficient to charge everyone that goes in there for all of it. There is such a thing as marginal cost. The marginal cost of this guys visit was next to nothing, but they shook him down for all kinds of other crap, much of which has dubious health value. I went to the hospital for a slipped disk. From cursory inspection the doctor could tell I had a slipped disk, but they gave me an x Ray. I said “does the x Ray show my slipped disk?” the doctor said “it doesn’t show that. I just gave you the x Ray to be on the safe side.” Then I had to get an MRI and they gave me a ton of opiates that I threw in the trash, after reading about them online. In the end, the physical therapy that got me back to health cost less than the ER visit. On top of everything, what really gets me is the gall of the medical shake down industry to bring up “costs.” They use the government to make everything as expensive as possible: the absurd licensing and education requirements, the restrictions on foreign practitioners and nurses, the “certificate of need” BS, the lax anti trust treatment as hospitals consolidate into regional monopolies under the laughable excuse of “efficiency,” the use of regulation to restrict suppliers of even generic drugs, the abominable statistical malpractice and pharm rep industry and stupid commercials used to push useless and harmful drugs on everyone—many of them paid for by government in both research and point of sale. At every level the whole system is by design a shamanistic and monopolistic ritual that achieves very little. Look at the failure to replicate of all these stupid studies, the way doctors respond to reimbursements in their use of quack drugs and surgeries, the flatlining of real quality of life stats even as expenditures explode, the power of the various professional associations.