I would have done it for ten bucks in Chinese takeout!

 This is a story of an acquaintance of mine. I will call him Kenji. Kenji is a decent enough guy, especially given his particularly tragic personal background. For all intents and purposes, he is an indoor cat. By way of example, I had to help him change his girlfriends tire once. I'm pretty sure the most blue-collar thing he has ever done is adjusted the screws on his drumset.

Anyhow, this is the story of a splinter in his hand. How someone who never fixes anything catches a splinter is beyond me, but it happened. Kenji, in the minuscule fraction of an isolated neuron that constitutes his practical sense, went to the ER. They fixed him up, and stumped him with a bill around US$ 600.

Yeah, you read that right. Six hundred dollars for a splinter in his hand. This upset Kenji enough to go around for like a week, telling anyone who would listen how bad US healthcare is. Maybe he has a point. I know about Bidenflation and the labor shortage, but that's at least one zero too many for pulling a splinter out of a dude's hand and taping it up. Doing that takes all of twenty minutes, but only if you spend ten of them looking for the tweezers.

When he told me this story, I made a show of how I had a pair of tweezers and some booze strong enough to sanitize a wound, right there in my house. I'm pretty sure there was gauze and tape somewhere in the bathroom, but my roommate brought the first aid from his car, just to help me make my point.

Then I looked at him: "Kenji, why the [clean speech] did you go to the ER? I would have done it for ten bucks in Chinese takeout!"

To be completely honest, I would have done it for free for most people. But Kenji is a pain to listen to, and a whiny leftoid to boot. Ten bucks would have paid for my gas to get to him, the materials I taped to his hand, and my time. Some good fried duck with sweet-sour sauce would have helped me deal with his whining on a mental health level.

I'm sure this is not an isolated story. Heck, just this morning I put a rather deep cut into my right thumb. It's currently covered in gauze, masking tape, and finally a layer of duct tape because the masking tape started to come off. It looks kind of ghetto, but my friend taped me up for free. Even if I buy him a fancy cigar as a gift of gratitude, that's still seven bucks, as opposed to a couple hundred.

This begs a question: how much of healthcare is so expensive because people go in for stuff where you really do not need a fully trained medical professional? Yes, I know there is all kinds of corruption and whatnot going on inside the healthcare system. I also know that there are a decent amount of people whom I would not trust to tape up my hand, because MPAI. And one or two people not going along with it won't fix the system. But it will save those one or two people a heck of a lot of money.