Shortcut? It's the express lane. My wife was in the ER for 4 hours for a bad asthma attack and it cost nearly two thousand bucks, and I'm told that's relatively cheap. We're STILL paying for it.
If you had said that you went into a walk in clinic I would expect a much lower service cost. You went into the same place that is perpetually prepared for a mass casualty scenario and received that level of service. Insurance has us so disconnected from healthcare service costs its easy to think everything should cost the same as the local mechanic or lawn care service.
My wife was in a bed for 3 of the 4 hours, seen by two nurses for maybe 1 of those hours total, and the doctor for barely 30 minutes while she took a large dose of her standard drug that we get over the counter for $20 a month. I'm not saying people shouldn't get paid, but two thousand dollars? And that's AFTER insurance, by the way.
A collision specialist will charge a greater rate for services than a local tire shop because; the tooling is greater and the staff skill levels are greater.
>two thousand dollars? And that's AFTER insurance, by the way
You never mentioned that this was after insurance. If your bill was vastly more than $2,000 - I can agree that we have a cost issue (stemming from insurance interference in the marketplace).
I can't tell if you're clinging to this argument out of pride or if you're just deliberately refusing to understand what "emergency" care is for some reason. Maybe you haven't had the experience of dialing up a significant other's parents to let them know what's going on and which hospital you're going to in the middle of the night, but let me tell you that planning out which hospital was going to screw us the least in the pocketbook was NOT in the forefront of my mind.
Edit: Full disclosure, this was the best case scenario: In network hospital and everything. I research this stuff ahead of time for this exact reason. The insurance company only covers 60% of the visit until I spend something like $4,500. When you make under $40k, $2,000 might as well be $4,500 might as well be a million dollars, it DOESN'T MATTER because it's still going to ruin you for a long time.
I can only imagine how silly you are trying to be!
This has been well documented and studied time and again.
It's not like Sweden or Denmark have much worse hospitals or doctors -- on the contrary, even a crappy US hospitalization will cost you several times more than what it would cost you there.
Heck, I was taken into a first class private hospital in an (advanced) Asian country, stayed there for the night, was taken care of by 4 nurses, had several exams/tests made, was consulted by 2 doctors, oh, and they even got me there by ambulance after a friend called (I had fainted atm).
I expected the worst, but the next day I was asked to pay something amounting to $50 -- without even having an insurance coverage (as I was just visiting).
The treatment can be relatively simple, but in those cases you usually don't go to the ED to begin with: an in-home nebulizer device costs a few hundred dollars (uninsured) and pays for itself by saving only one ED trip (even if insured). The exception, naturally, is if your asthma is undiagnosed or usually not problematic, or if you run out of medication and need more in a hurry.
If it goes beyond that, the patient will often require intravenous medication, which a typical walk-in clinic is not equipped to administer. Even if the attack is obliging enough to occur when the clinic is open, all they will do is send you to the nearest emergency department.
The most severe attacks will require EMTs on-site, because the patient could easily die before reaching the hospital. One sometimes goes to the hospital in cases where one fears it will escalate to this as a simple preemptive, because if it goes badly you die.
It's true that there is a cost to handling all of this, and that needs to be understood. Still, it's worth remembering that this isn't some frivolous waste of resources: said resources are being applied to a legitimate need. The alternative is not to accept a lesser "level of service", it is to accept a nontrivial risk of dying of suffocation.
An asthma attack that cannot be controlled by the kind of self-administered drugs usually prescribed to asthmatics (or experienced by someone who does not have those drugs) is a life-threatening emergency; walk-in clinics are not not set up to handle them, will likely send you out to an ER if you present with one, and are often not open when they occur.
Even combined HMO/provider entities like Kaiser (who are footing the bill themselves, and don't get more money if you take a method that incurs greater costs) will, if you call their advice line with such an attack, direct you to the ER.