Uh, no.
A patient complains about her emergency room bill. Of course after the fact, it looks absurd. But she didn’t know beforehand whether it was something serious or not.
So, the $1,000+ was for a physician’s evaluation, and the exclusion of life-threatening disease. Not just for the Tylenol.
Normally Dubner gets it right, but here the analysis is terribly short-sighted.
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Geeze - I’ll bet that student had a cell phone. Why didn’t they call their mother? She would have told them to take two tylenol and see what happened.
My son is going off to school next fall. We have a huge co-pay on ER visits! Note to self: tell son to take two and call me the morning!
Wow! When my son was born (by c-sect) in 1991 - we got out bill from the hospital. I immediately requested the details…and discovered that we were basically charged for bringing me back to life! What? I did not realize that I had died while giving birth! When we called the hospital their response was “Oops..someone must have accidently keyed that in your file. Sorry!”.