Emergency Millionaires

Tonight, when I was putting Troy to bed, he asked me to hold his ear. When I asked him why, he said because it hurt. Since it seemed like more of an irritation to him than causing him serious pain, I brushed it aside, thinking to just monitor it the next day. Big…mistake!

At around 10:30 pm, he sat upright in his bed and started wailing. It took us a half an hour to finally calm him down enough for him to tell us what was wrong. We tried giving him some Tylenol for the pain, but he kept going through bouts of wailing and being calm. My wife took him to the couch in the den and turned some TV on with the hopes of distracting him long enough for the medicine to kick in, which mostly worked. Until around midnight, when he started wailing again.

At this point, we made the call to take him to the doctor. The only problem was that at this time of night, the only thing open was the emergency room. So, we took to Texas Presbyterian around the corner from us. We’d never been to this hospital before, but it was close, and we were exhausted. It was also close enough to the house that we could make a run home if needed.

The staff was extremely nice, and we were literally the only people in the emergency room that night, so we got taken right in and were given everyone’s full attention. They were also overly-gentle with Troy, since he’s just a munchkin. After a drawn-out fight over them sticking something in Troy’s ear that finally required three nurses and myself to hold Troy down, the doctor determined that he had an ear infection. He gave Troy an antibiotic, which thankfully we were able to get Troy to drink eventually. Unfortunately, it took them so long to bring the medicine into the room that Troy had fallen asleep before they came back. So, we had to wake him up, endure another wail fest, and calm him down again.

By the time they were finally ready to discharge us, it was around 2:30 in the morning. That’s when they hit us with the bad news…the bill. It was over $5000 for our two hours in the hospital! $1100 of that was simply for the privilege of going inside. That’s it…just for the use of the room. The rest was for the privilege of having a doctor come look at our son. It was so ludicrous that I have no words. How can they justify charging people that?! Then, at the end of the night, they drive off in their $100,000 car back to their $3 million mansion.

The stupidest part is that had I taken heed when Troy mentioned his earache to me, we could have taken him to urgent care and paid $95…total. So, let’s recap. We could have gotten the exact same level of care for $5000 less if we’d acted two hours sooner. How does that make sense?