Just something to share about this as someone who had a recent almost-rabies encounter. TLDR is that rabies shots cost like 4K/ea. My wife and I woke up in the

Just something to share about this as someone who had a recent almost-rabies encounter. TLDR is that rabies shots cost like 4K/ea. My wife and I woke up in the middle of the night with a bat flying around our room (thanks to our cat jumping on the bed). We caught the bat and released it and basically thought nothing of it. A few days later my wife was talking to friend and she mentioned that we had a possible rabies encounter — bat bites are incredibly small and if you are sleeping its very possible you wouldn't have even felt the bite. Naturally we were shocked and searched our bodies and found nothing, but just to be certain we called our local department of health and found that, yes, this is a valid rabies exposure event and we were eligible for rabies care. (For future reference, you're supposed to basically catch and kill/freeze the animal and send it to animal control for rabies testing to see if you actually had an exposure. We were woken up at 4am so didn't really think to look up rabies protocol at the time) Cue USA Healthcare insanity. So we first find out after calling the hospital that rabies vaccines are only administered in the ER, meaning we can't just go to any urgent care center and get a shot. Not only this, but the rabies vaccine is a series of 4 shots, each about a week apart. And "because USA", the system has no way of remembering that we're in for a planned series of shots, meaning we have to be re-ingested into the ER every time we enter (keeping in mind that a global pandemic is still going on). So now we're going to the ER for about ~3 hours every few weeks, of which on _literally every visit_ they ask us the exact same series of boilerplate questions about basic health info. 99% of our time is filling out paperwork, the shot itself takes seconds. We started to wonder if it was really worth it, but its worth remembering rabies is basically 100% fatal. So it was basically risking sure death via rabies or being subjected to an ER wing during a global pandemic multiple times a month. We went with "get the shots". But it gets worse. So after everything is done, we get a hospital bill. As it turns out, EACH RABIES SHOT IS $4,000! EACH SHOT! This means that between my wife and I, we accrued $32,000 in medical bills for simply trying to not subject ourselves to absolute death. I find this totally insane. On top of the rabies bills we were also charged for ER charges, which apparently are weird because the ER doctors bill separately from the ER itself, and those costs also ran into the thousands. Luckily we had health insurance, and our county covered some of the costs as well. The whole structure of this is outrageous. Yes, for profit healthcare is bad, but this is on another level. Just imagining someone less fortunate than us that gets into this situation. You're staring down $32,000+ in medical bills, or death. Which do you choose? The whole experience left such a terrible taste in my mouth that I hate the USA even more for even requiring this calculus in the first place.