Oh you're right, I should've told my wife to calm down with her gasping for air until the morning when I could take her to a more wallet friendly clinic.

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.