In January 2015, Malcolm Bird took his 1-year-old daughter, Collette, to an emergency room after she started bleeding heavily from a cut on her finger. The doctor cleaned up the cut, put a Band-Aid on it, and sent them home.
A few weeks later, the family received a bill in the mail for $629. The breakdown of the bill was $7 for the Band-Aid, and $622 for what's known as an "emergency room facility fee” — the price a hospital charges for seeking services from an emergency room, no matter what problem a patient is having.