Close Encounters of the Healthcare Kind

Mid afternoon Thursday: I get a call from the school nurse.  Caitlyn fell on the asphalt at recess and busted up her hand and skinned her knee.  The nurse says, "Her little finger on her right hand took the worst of  it, I think it might be fractured."
"Oh crap," I think, though probably in slightly more PG-13 language, "here we go."
What immediately starts running through my mind is really responsible adult type stuff: ER or Urgent Care, Pediatrician? No way, it will take a week to get an appointment.  I have to leave the office with a sermon only half done, I've got to get Michele to leave work early to make sure she can be home for Jack to get off the bus, I've got to hope and pray that we're not in the ER for six or seven hours because I have to preach a service at Grace Lutheran church, where I've never been, in the evening.  All the way from the Church to the school, I'm going through all this stuff, and thinking about how this is going to be another $400 or $500 hospital bill...
Then I walk into the nurses office...
And there's my little girl, all green around the gills, with her hand on an icepack and a trash can next to her, because she had been throwing up, because she was probably in shock, and I know that all the stuff I had been thinking about was utter crap (though probably in slightly more PG-13 language).
Then I go from being a responsible adult to just being Dad.  I don't know when that happened: the responsible adult thing or the Dad thing, but I'm pretty sure they're related.  I ask the nurse: "ER or urgent care?"  She says, "ER, if it's actually broken it will save you a step."
Okay, so that clears that up, and I have to be calm and help Cate, who's still looking a little piqued, not worry too much about what's going to happen, and off to the ER we go.
"No, X-rays don't hurt."
"It will probably just be a splint either way."
"Do you still feel like you're going to throw up?  Because please not in the car."
So we do the ER thing and the X-Rays show no broken bones, just a really banged up and bruised pinkie finger and then the responsible adult makes another appearance: "Great, another $500 band aid."
I have such mixed feelings about all of this.
I am so glad that I can just take my wounded little chick to the ER and get her taken care of, but I really wish there wasn't going to be such a steep price tag for the whole ordeal.  By the way, I have insurance, it's actually pretty good insurance... for big stuff, but it doesn't really help much with the "small" stuff.
But medical "emergencies" don't ever feel small, when they happen to your kids.
I am thankful that the actual health and care part of our system does actually seem to work pretty well.
What I wish is that the economic part of it wasn't so mangled.  I have tried to understand, and I get that in our capitalist society everyone wants to make a buck. I get that insurance companies want to make profits for doing what they do, I get that doctors and nurses work extremely hard and deserve to get paid, I get that medical equipment is expensive and running a hospital is a big operation, but I wonder why it is that other developed nations like Spain and the UK and even Canada, can manage something that makes more fiscal sense, while we've got a very functional healthcare system that is economically farcical.
The reason why it's bloated is also the reason why it's going to be really hard to fix: because a lot of people make a lot of money on the way things work now, but it leaves regular folk having to pay $500 for a band-aid, and there's something broken about that, even if my daughter's pinkie finger wasn't.