Tom Karchus says his 17-year-old son was crying from the pain in his ear and the stuff the doctor

had suggested like Advil was not helping.

And it's all this time in his ears is hurting more and more and more. And just like what do I do it's like I don't know what to do so

it's it's like nine or ten at night at this point and I know I don't want to go to the

emergency room if I can avoid it.

It turns out there is no place you can take him other than the emergency room after 8 p.m.

This is near Raleigh, North Carolina.

And full disclosure, Tom is a backer of this show on Patreon.

So we go to the emergency room, and we stay around for just a short while,

and then we go and we talk to the doctor.

His son gets a throat culture for Streep, that's negative, so it's an ear infection.

They give him a dose of penicillin, dose of prednisone, steroid to take down the inflammation that's

causing the pain. Everything's great, the doctor's really nice, blah, blah,

and then we go home.

And then a few weeks later, he gets the bill,

more than 3,300 bucks.

I mean, I just was sort of stunned that it was such a big number and then of course I

call them and I said please send me some bill detail and the bill detail had

exactly the same information on it as the bill I'd gotten before.

There was no more detail.

There was a little bit of detail on the original bill.

Two charges for drugs, that's the antibiotic and the prednisone total 20 bucks and a charge for lab work

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