I went in for a blood test

It’s one of the most common tests in medicine, and it is performed millions of times a year around the country. Should a metabolic blood panel test cost $11 or $952?

Both of these are real, negotiated prices, paid by health insurance companies to laboratories in Jackson, Miss., and El Paso in 2016. New data, analyzing the health insurance claims of 34 million Americans covered by large commercial insurance companies, shows that enormous swings in price for identical services are common in health care.    NYT

I went in for a blood test on a warm and sunny day.

The doctors and the nurses poked me without much delay.

They pumped it out like gasoline, but bothered I was not;

I figured they could tell me all the bugs that I had caught.

I tipped my hat and left them with a song upon my lips,

thinking modern medicine my ills would soon eclipse.

But came the clinic bill another day without sunshine;

for all that simple blood work I was charged amounts malign!

I couldn't pay it off if I would live a hundred years;

my faith in modern medicine has turned to shaken fears.

The bill collectors call me, and my car now has a lien;

I suffer from insomnia, and think I burst my spleen.

I do not know the cure for debt, I doubt there's really any.

I feel as if I've been impaled upon a spinning jenny!