Very recently my wife survived an unexpected extremely rare serious medical emergency (75% of people die from it and in the past 15 years less than a handful of people have survived it in all of Australia). She ended up in ICU for 3 days, 10 days total in hospital, emergency surgery that took "hours and hours", had an organ removed, lost 5L of blood, a second non life threatening surgery, tons of tests, scans, injections, medications, 2 more blood transfusions, at one point had 4 lines hooked up to her, even in her feet lol, etc. Total cost at the hospital was $0.00, after we left we've purchased about $30 of medication and there will be some low on going costs related to the organ management. We've also had some follow up specialist appointments, the ones related directly to the problem have all been covered 100%. A couple of them which were tests/scans to check to make sure a similar problem couldn't occur in the future we had to pay some out of pocket (total about $300, we didn't have to do these but we wanted to), and I paid about $85 for parking for 10 days.
I actually asked how much this all cost the government and the specialist said that none of the costs are documented at all as it is just another overhead that would cost time and money to manage and it doesn't matter to the hospital as they receive a lump sum from the government and they do everything they can with that amount. I'd love (hate) to know how much all of this would have cost if we lived in USA...
