You're right, that's exactly the case. Sorry if I explained it poorly. The spot where this gets really fantastically expensive is when you get to the "wash, r

You're right, that's exactly the case. Sorry if I explained it poorly. The spot where this gets really fantastically expensive is when you get to the "wash, rinse, repeat" part of the situation. After all, someone who is just being stabilized and discharged without significant treatment of the underlying cause is much more likely to just get sick again. There's a hospital in the town where I grew up which managed to shave millions off of the cost of operating their emergency department in a rather instructive way: They identified their most expensive repeat patients, and started just paying to send them in for regular medical care for whatever health problems it was they had. Yeah it meant that they were giving out free health care to these folks, but that turned out to be nothing compared to the cost of having them show up in an ambulance every other week.