Like, I'll absolutely grant that it's not cheap to knock people out—my friend's father growing up was an anesthesiologist assistant and he made good money doing it, which is fair enough considering it's a job where you literally hold people's lives in your hands. I don't want the guy feeding me propofol to be an underpaid grunt.
But in addition to the already-too-high healthcare costs in this country (specifically the way that those costs get passed onto patients), it sucks getting a separate anesthesiologist bill on top of whatever you paid for the procedure that warranted going under in the first place. Especially when the cost of the initial procedure was insulting to begin with.
And I don't think it's solely a matter of outpatient surgery centers using third-party anesthesia techs. A few years back I was meant to get a bronchoscopy (basically a colonoscopy for your lungs) at a prestigious local hospital, but the anesthesiologist never showed up (and they weren't gonna put a tube down my trachea while I was awake, lol) so they had to send me home. Turns out there was a scheduling snafu and the anesthesiologist who was supposed to be there never got notified that they were on duty.
How does a hospital not have in-house anesthesiologists? Are they really cutting costs by scheduling medical technicians like they're picking up shifts at Taco Bell?