Emergency rooms are monopolies
I&#x27;m amazed at the stupidity permeating this thread ( and wiling to burn karma to defend against it).<p>A random guy wakes up at 1am with a cramped muscle. Goes to facility that is equipped to deal with <i>anything</i>. On the spot surgeries, ability to break teeth safely to intubate and keep alive, drugs, cabinets with up to date equipment. Staffed with non-expired drugs that are regularly recycled. Staffed with people that can use all that round the clock, multiple backups. Staffed with people that keep the place reasonably sterile and safe. Staffed with all others to support an operation like that and expecting to get sued if it fails even a bit.<p>And then complains, he had to pitch in for all that. An engineer, most likely earning above 8k usd, had to give a weekly salary for something that he considered worth dragging his butt out of bed at 1 am.<p>The guy is delusional.<p>The US health care is, on the expensive side, and can be better, but nobody can argue it without taking into account all that goes into maintaining that, just so one can randomly walk inside with a spasm, or after a huge carcrash with 40 broken bones, and liters of blood lost, and probably  stay alive.<p>I&#x27;m also amazed how most people here just ignore the reality of the scope of the overall operation, and claim that for a limited use case, it&#x27;s too expensive.<p>I&#x27;m not even going to insert a car analogy here. If you can&#x27;t see why health care by nature is socialized and a utilitarian model, I&#x27;m not going to argue with people from USA thinking that everything should be proportional to the service and their pocket.<p>Man up. You are not the center of the universe. This civilization was built for you, by people, and no matter if you like it or not, you will pay to maintain it for the people coming after you.<p>Humanity, is a social concept worth defending.