Emergency rooms often bill you a “cover charge” just for walking in the door, and it can be thousands of dollars.

That’s in addition to the huge markup on everything that happens there: seven bucks for a band-aid. Twenty dollars for a couple of pills.

Reporter Sarah Kliff has collected more than a thousand ER bills from her readers at Vox.

She was an expert on health care before starting this project — she covered it for years at the Washington Post before moving to Vox — but even she found plenty of surprises.

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Why are ER bills so horrible? Sarah Kliff spent a year finding out. (Season One, episode 7)

An Arm and a Leg

Why are ER bills so horrible? Sarah Kliff spent a year finding out. (Season One, episode 7)