it's not random at all. urgent care will charge for the swab and send you to the lab for the blood work. it would be a few hundred dollars. going to the hospit

it's not random at all. urgent care will charge for the swab and send you to the lab for the blood work. it would be a few hundred dollars. going to the hospital in this case is like taking your prius to the ferrari service center for an oil change. you should expect to pay multiple times the reasonable cost for such a routine service. i can totally understand if he thought he might need all the extra services of a hospital, and wouldn't really know until he got there. but in this specific case, he already knew in advance he can't afford it and should have started simpler. if he had gotten the CT scan, found it was negative, then was unable to pay, that's a different story. there's plenty to criticize in this chain of events (eg that the hospital went nuclear as their first option -- regardless of ability to pay) but that hospitals are more expensive than urgent care isn't one of them.