The emergency room bill is enough to make you sick

Are you ready to play "How much was that visit to the ER?"

OK, so a weekend athlete is playing soccer with his pals in Santa Monica, tries to make a stop and butts heads with an opposing player.

Our warrior goes down in a heap, stands up, touches his head and realizes he's bleeding.

It's immediately clear that although the injury doesn't appear to be serious, our boy is going to need some stitches on his forehead, just under the hairline.

So Lance Budris, who happens to be a doctor, is out of the game and on his way to get patched up.

"I thought about calling a friend to stitch it up," said Budris, an anesthesiologist.

But it was Sunday morning, and he didn't want to bother a colleague on a day off for so minor a mishap. Instead, he had a friend drive him to a Westside hospital, where he walked into the emergency room in his soccer gear, holding a bloody towel to his head.

After a short wait, a nurse took his vitals, an ER tech washed the gash with a saline solution and he got a tetanus shot because he couldn't remember when he'd had his last one.

Then the doctor came in, draped the area and sutured the wound, a two-layer job that required 29 stitches. Budris was on his way roughly two hours after arriving at the hospital.

That was in July.

The bill arrived last month.

Go ahead, take a wild guess before you read the next paragraph. Are you ready?

Two bills, one for ER costs and one for the doctor's fee, totaled nearly $5,000.

Dr. Budris was floored.

As a physician, he's well aware that emergency room treatment is very expensive. But knowing the true cost of the limited supplies and labor required to treat such a minor wound, he found the experience more than a little disturbing.

For one thing, he could barely understand the bill sent him by the hospital, which he asked me not to name. I agreed after checking around and finding that the charges were not out of whack with other ERs. Budris' story isn't about one hospital.

Instead, it's a snapshot of a healthcare system gone mad, in which doctors are discouraged, hospitals go out of business and costs are inflated in a shell game between health insurance companies and medical service providers, while the patients who pay their bills get shafted.

But back to Budris' bill. It listed something called "M/S SUPPLY GENERAL," which came to $1,247. Then there was another $2,425 for "EMERGENCY ROOM GENERAL."