Regular readers may remember that I almost killed my wife a couple of months ago. She was complaining about stomach pains and thought she should go to the emergency room. It’s probably nothing, I told her. They’ll charge you a million dollars to tell you that you have indigestion.
Luckily, she didn’t listen to me. She didn’t have indigestion, it turns out; she had a lousy appendix that caused a medical emergency. The bill to sort it out, which arrived last week, wasn’t a million dollars but it was heart-stoppingly high. According to our insurance company, the hospital had billed $83,135.08 (£67,000) for the procedure but – lucky us! – we would “only” have to pay about $2,000.
