$10000 looks like he got off easy given he visited an ER. Some unfortunate ones have to pay close to that amount just for the privilege of sitting in an ER, without getting any meaningful treatment.
My wife had to go to the ER 24 yrs after delivering our second kid because of a medical error during post partum care at the same hospital. She sat in the ER from 9pm until 6am 72 hrs after giving birth and was offered the womens bathroom to pump in. She never saw a doctor or got past triage despite the delivery unit telling her to go to the ER immediately. We got a 4.5k bill, insurance paid most of it, but we’ve refused to pay the deductible on principal.
After to many of these we just have a family policy that we are the final arbiters of a reasonable and fair medical bill given the error rates in billing. We have a high enough credit score that collections doesn’t scare us.
It's not just some ER, it looks like he went to the Mayo Clinic which is one of the top hospitals in the world. It's the kind of institution that world leaders from around the world travel to for complex treatments.
He also bypassed multiple urgent care centers and went to the Mayo Clinic ER adjacent to North Scottsdale, instead of going to closer Banner University in Downtown Phoenix. He doesn't say if Mayo is in network, but that would be a shocker. Funny there is always a 'rest of the story' in these policy based stories.
There will be a charge for the facility itself. There will be a charge for the nurse that initially took you in and triaged you by looking at you and deciding you weren't immediately dying.
Then after sitting there for 4 hours, you might have gotten 10 minutes with a doctor who'd have said something like "You are ok, take a tylenol". This is not any run of the mill doctor, this is an ER doctor, so obviously their charges are in the thousands too.
Whenever this gets brought up someone replies with, "Well, it needs medical training to confirm that you are indeed ok", and I completely agree. And I won't be complaining if the whole visit costed a few hundred dollars. But a few thousand?
