The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

Is this true in the public system as well?

I'm asking since in Romania the public hospitals are still more miss than hit, even in big cities.

Hospital managers are politically appointed leading to terrible corruption and inefficiencies, meaning waiting times can be pretty long so the doctors who work there refer you to their private practices, and while conditions on the surface look good and everything is covered by the public insurance in theory, sometimes hospitals are short on supplies, asking you or your relatives to bring stuff from home, the food can be terrible, and you never know what corners some staff might have cut and you end up picking some dangerous hospital transmitted bacteria leaving you worse off than when you came in. And sometimes, if you're unlucky, you can end up in healthcare hell where you get bounced around between different hospitals if each judges you're not their problem to deal with.

Outside of big cities, you don't even want to go near any public hospital unless your situation is serious.

When my mom was admitted to the local hospital for infectious diseases around 2008ish, there were roaches and rats everywhere and this was in a big medical university city of the country. Pretty sure the roaches and rats are gone nowadays, but still that was unacceptable.

There must be other countries with cheap care.

Someone should make a startup for that.

But wait, the financing in the U.S. is quite predatory, so a lot of people pay nothing, and a few people are stuck with outrageous bills. It's like the infamous SF General Hospital that offered loads of free care to the poor and to immigrants and then refused to take any insurance so that normal people were regularly driven to bankruptcy if the ambulence took them there. The U.S. healthcare is one in which a half a million is spent on emergency care for an indigent person and 10 middle class families lose their life savings of 50K treating snakebites and broken arms.

Once you wrap your head around this, you'll understand we have a very similar problem in higher education, and for very similar reasons.

Today I learned that doctors and nurses in Russia work for nothing. No? So where does the money to pay them come from?

The American Medical Association is an Anti Consumer lobbying group that literally 400M on bribes. Physicians should be punished. The other various medical cartels should be punished too.

The easy solution is to legalize science based medicine. But the Authority based medicine establishment would never let that happen.