Emergency rooms often bill you a “cover charge” just for walking in the door, and it can be thousands of dollars.
That’s in addition to the huge markup on everything that happens there: seven bucks for a band-aid. Twenty dollars for a couple of pills.
Reporter Sarah Kliff has collected more than a thousand ER bills from her readers at Vox.
She was an expert on health care before starting this project — she covered it for years at the Washington Post before moving to Vox — but even she found plenty of surprises.
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