There is an easy way to avoid this, don't go to the Emergency Room unless you have an Emergency.
And all of that only happened because my friend didn't take multiple "no" from the ER doctor for an answer and insisted that I get at least a rudimentary checkup by them, otherwise I would be dead. So, respectfully, your comment is bullshit.
Your friend was right in that the emergency room doctor should do their job, but their job isn't to be the primary physician, they're there to diagnose and treat emergencies.
If you were tachycardic, tachypneic, apneic, hypotensive, hypertensive, febrile, hypothermic, bloody, pale, in severe localized pain, slurring speech, paretic, then the ER would investigate until answers are obtained, because all of the above are concerning.
A complaint of only fainting has many non emergency causes, and you would have to provide additional information that would warrant investigation. Ordering fishing expedition tests in the ER is extremely wasteful in a non emergency situation. Imagine how many people go to the ER for nonemergency care and expensive tests are ordered unnecessarily! Because of defensive medicine, this happens way too much, which is why healthcare costs so damn much in this country.
She felt that losing her ear was a possible outcome of the accident, which certainly seems like an emergency.
More broadly, it can be difficult for a layman to determine what warrants emergency care vs what doesn't.
We get these complaints in Germany too (where I currently live) BTW. "A five-minute drive with an ambulance shouldn't cost €500!" someone complained to the newspaper here recently. It doesn't, what costs €500 is keeping enough ambulances ready that one can arrive within x minutes with y% probability, for IMO overcautious values of x and y.
IIRC an ambulance ride in the US is 10-20k, that's indicative of just how much more medical care costs over there.
What might be similar that the billable item is not the costly item. Of course I don't know the first thing about US health care costs (as opposed to billable items).
No hospital administration would allow this: they would refer you to a separate medical imaging clinic, or run one on hospital grounds that all departments would refer patients to.
I.e. you, as the hospital, inflate your price, by X00% margin over what you actually plan to charge the insurance. Then you let the insurance negotiators negotiate, and you negotiate down to the reasonable price.
This looks really good on the paper. Unfortunately, you as a patient, if you don't have good coverage, you end up paying the inflated price, that you didn't really have the chance of negotiating (and wouldn't really have the chance even if you hadn't been unconcious ;)
Like, if I compare it to Czech Republic, where I live (or even Germany), the prices seem much more reasonable (i.e. you would be able to get a complication-free birth in hospital for ~400$, more complicated, i.e. cesarean section ~1500$, including hospital stay, in US it seem to be 5-10x as much)
Not American, but from what I've read in these types of news articles, you often CAN negotiate it down a lot, but when you get a huge bill in the mail, the first thing you think isn't "I'm going to try to haggle down my $5000 bill with this huge hospital" you think "I'm so screwed. Time to google 'personal bankruptcy', was it 7 years?". Pharmaceutical companies are also always saying that they will subsidize prescription medications for those who can't afford it, but I dunno how much that is BS or not.
(but you are getting the negotiated price anyway; the paranoid part of my brain thinks they run a scam here by recoding bills that come after the deductible has been met, which is a different sort of negotiation than agreeing on prices for services)
If you claim to not have insurance, the same visit is $80.
Medical care is anything if not statistical. If an ER is receiving non-emergency patients, they know it, and can design their care processes to handle those patients efficiently.
If they're billing patients $5k for a bandage, it's solely a financial boondoggle. There is also a political aspect -- blaming poor people for "wasting" care by making unnecessary use of the ER.