If you’re not bleeding, have a broken limb or other trauma or an expectation of being admitted, you don’t belong in the ER. Take a benadryl.
An ER handles everything from bee stings to shootings or strokes. They’re optimized to deal with those emergencies, not optimize cost for minor dings, especially when most of the minor issues are uninsured people who won’t pay anyway.
Emergency medicine is not a profit center, and is often mandated to exist. You’re paying for all of the lost receivables and capability.
Yeah, and urgent care facilities usually have working hours like 8AM-8PM. Because, you know, those are the only hours people every get minor sicknesses.
"Clark had to decide: Should she take Lily to the emergency room?
She called a poison control hotline and the answer was yes ...
But Clark knew that the emergency room can be expensive.
...
“I’m weighing my options,” Clark says. “She could have a seizure at any moment. It felt terrible, as a parent, to be in the position of having to do that.”
Clark and her husband decided to give Lily some activated charcoal at home and drive to the emergency room. But they wouldn’t go inside.
Instead, they pulled their car into the second row of the parking lot, about 100 feet from the entrance. They start playing The Little Mermaid on the car’s TV screen for Lily to watch. And they waited.
“We were just sitting there, facing the door and watching Lily,” Clark says. “We chose the second row because we wanted to be close to the entrance, but also trying to look inconspicuous.”
The Clarks waited in the parking lot for a few hours, and Lily didn’t show any symptoms. They drove home without setting foot in the emergency room."