Sometimes you come across a story that is truly astonishing and makes you wonder why somebody isn’t going to jail. One such story is of a man who was charged $489,000 for an air ambulance ride.

$489,000?

Somebody should be going to jail.

To summarize: a fellow named Sean Deines and his wife, Rebekah, were road-tripping after he lost his job as a bartender in North Carolina when the pandemic hit. But while visiting his grandfather in a remote part of Wyoming, Sean started to feel very ill. A trip to an “Urgent Care” revealed that Sean had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a fast-growing blood cancer.

After an initial admission in Casper, Sean was moved to the University of Colorado Hospital near Denver, for advanced treatment. However, Sean didn’t know anyone in Colorado, and the couple decided it was prudent to return to North Carolina, where they could get help from his family and be treated at Duke University Medical Center (which was in his insurance network).

His family called Angel MedFlight which told Rebekah that it would accept whatever the couple’s insurer would pay and that they would not be held responsible for any remaining balance. But when he was discharged a month later, he was charged $489,000 for the 1,468 flight ($70,000 of that was for the ground ambulance service to and from the Denver and Raleigh-Durham airports).

• $419,000 for the flight.
• $70,000 for ground transportation.

Are these people insane?

It turns out that the flight wasn’t covered because it wasn’t considered “medically necessary” — something the insurance company should have told the wife when she called — and it was resolved when it came under the microscope at NPR.

But what if it hadn’t come under the microscope at NPR?

I mean, WTF?

Why isn’t this fat shit in jail already?