Several years ago, when I was working in a small mountain town in Colorado, I cut my thumb open on the stem of a wine glass while I was doing the dishes. It wasn’t super serious, but it was a good, deep gash (four years later, I still have a scar). It was a small town short on medical options a Sunday afternoon, so I headed for the hospital in search of one of those quick care/prompt care/no-appointment-necessary establishments (the hospital back home had one). I walked through the door and asked the woman behind the desk, “Quick care?” Her response, “This is it.” At the time I was on what we called “catastrophic” insurance that did basically nothing unless I got something serious. We waited in the lobby for two hours before a nurse gave me a tetanus shot and a doctor put a bandage on my thumb (no stitches or anything). A few weeks later I got the bill: $1,200.It turns out that when the woman behind the desk said “This is it,” she wasn’t telling me I was at quick care, she was telling me that my only option on a Sunday afternoon, 10,000 feet in the Rockies was the emergency room. For a cut on my thumb. Had she mentioned that my bill would have been anywhere close to $1,200, I would have gone elsewhere on Monday morning. Whatever. After appealing the bill, I ended up paying virtually the whole damn thing. Over a grand, at least. Fast forward to last week, when I accompanied a loved one a prompt care/no-appointment-necessary joint in the area. It was a small waiting room, and everyone was up in everyone’s business. One woman and what I assume was her son got into a discussion with the woman (nurse?) behind the counter about what a visit would cost. From what I could tell, it would have been $80 for a standard visit, and just over $110 if they had to do something extra that they seemed to anticipate. They didn’t have the $110, but I got the impression that they had the $80. The woman behind the counter told the woman that if they went to the emergency room, they couldn’t refuse to treat her. The woman next to me piped up and told her that the ER would bill them LATER and that they could be treated today without any money. They left and went to the ER.