Sutures: https://www.amazon.com/Non-Absorbable-Surgical-Practice-Vete...

I'm not certain what your point is here. You can buy veterinarian training equipment online, but so what?

It’s likely a local anasthetic and simple stitching. Both of these can be found in normal first aid kits, so I would bet that you can legally use it at home.

Even in the hospital, this work was probably done by a nurse with a 2 year degree. You can go to any clinic and have it done. If the kid were at summer camp, they would have probably had the staff nurse do it.

Emergency rooms are both overkill for this, and happily overcharge as well.

We are all talking as if the hospitals performed a dangerous complex procedure and saved the kids life. If so, then isn’t 19,000 a small price to pay? If not (and it’s a simple task as I believe) then why did they charge so much?

> Both of these can be found in normal first aid kits

Neither are found in a normal first aid kit.

> I would bet that you can legally use it at home

No, suturing is a surgical procedure.

> this work was probably done by a nurse with a 2 year degree

I'm not a medic, but from what I can gather online, suturing is considered an advanced specialised skill for nurses.

> If the kid were at summer camp, they would have probably had the staff nurse do it.

I doubt it, even with a qualified nurse on site. No summer camp wants a reputation for being reluctant to take injured children to the emergency room, neither do they want liability.

> Emergency rooms are both overkill for this

Does any first-world country agree with you on this? As far as I'm aware suturing is always treated this way, it's not just for-profit medicine and artificial gatekeeping.

> We are all talking as if the hospitals performed a dangerous complex procedure and saved the kids life

It's routine emergency medicine. Nothing more, nothing less.

> If so, then isn’t 19,000 a small price to pay?

No, it's absurdly inflated.

> If not (and it’s a simple task as I believe) then why did they charge so much?

Because they could. There's a deep power imbalance at play. You can't go price-shopping when your child needs emergency treatment. You might know going in that medical expenses are the top cause of personal bankruptcies in the USA, but you can't haggle. You won't even know what you owe until after the fact.

Brits like myself are generally horrified at the way American medicine is run. This kind of thing simply doesn't happen in the UK. (That's not to say our healthcare system is perfect, of course.)

I don’t really know what to say except that your experience doesn’t match mine.

I could look up research articles on best practices but I often find that those things just pay lip service to what we are “supposed” to do and not what actually happens.

Also I take exception to this notion that unless your country has economic power in the top 20 of the world, then whatever practices you have has no value.

Extreme specialization is a byproduct of rich economies but that shouldn’t be confused with it being a good practice in all cases.

> We're talking about emergency medical treatment for a child. You think there's time to search around for the best price?

Exactly, this child got the emergency treatment. His dad wasn't asked to pay 19k upfront.

I write all this because I was born in a country where all medical treatment is free for everyone.

Guess what? It's super low quality. Doctors got paid less than in McDonald's. If you have a serious problems you literally have to search for a right doctor. It might be someone not even in your large town. And, you pay upfront! So, I'd rather live broke than die because no one even treats me.

I'm sorry the quality was so poor in the country you were born in, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's (only) because the service was free (there could be other reasons), or that poor quality is a necessary consequence of healthcare being paid entirely or mostly with public funding.

Public healthcare isn't entirely free where I live, but the fraction of the cost paid directly by the patient is small enough that it qualifies as mostly free to most people. Complaining about public healthcare almost seems like it's a national sport, and it's true that you can get shorter queues and faster response in non-emergency cases if you go private, but the quality of public healthcare as a whole still doesn't suck, and especially emergency care and treatment for serious conditions is still pretty good.

Doctors get paid less than e.g. in the U.S., but they're still among the most well-paid professions.

What I think leads to disaster is if funding to public healthcare is poor and the quality is low, which leads to people not appreciating the service and thus towards further devaluation of the public system, which becomes a vicious cycle.

It may also make sense to not have healthcare entirely free so that people don't start going to see a doctor too easily for reasons not requiring a doctor, but I think a system where it's potentially way too expensive does at least as much damage.

I don't claim to know what happened in your country of birth, but there could be factors other than just free healthcare.

I'm sorry to read that but just because that system sucked it doesn't mean the US system doesn't also suck. Other countries have better healthcare systems both in terms of cost and actual quality of service. America should be modelling themselves after the best in the world rather than comparing themselves against the worst and saying "at least we're not that bad"

There is a middle ground between the two dysfunctional extremes that works well in a lot of countries.

It's not a just matter of finding a 'golden mean' on the spectrum of nationalisation/privatisation, there's another dimension: competence of execution.