One of the most shocking aspects of health care costs in the US are ambulance bills, reports Jalopnik.

Data from healthcare nonprofit Fair Health shows that between 2017 and 2020, the average costs for transporting non-critical patients to the hospital rose 17.5 percent from $800 to $940.

Patients needing critical ambulance transport saw a near 40 percent increase during the same period.

Often those bills can come as a surprise to those who get them, and some expect their insurance to take care of the bill.

Others will get completely blindsided by it, like one Northern California man who received a $13,000 bill for his six-mile ambulance ride from one hospital to another.

In July 2023, The Washington Post reports that Jagdish Whitten was out on a run when he tried to cross a busy street in San Francisco and was hit by a car.

The impact was hard enough that he says he did "a little flip" before hitting the ground.

Witnesses to the accident called for an ambulance, but Whitten instead had his friends come and take him to the hospital.

Once he got to the hospital he was treated for his minor injuries, which included a broken toe and some bruises.

However Whitten had also suffered a minor concussion in the accident. Because of this, the hospital informed Whitten he would have to be taken to the only trauma center in the city, which was at another local hospital. The hospital called for an ambulance to take him to the trauma center. Once there, it proved to be a waste of time

After a short ambulance ride, Whitten said, emergency room doctors checked him out, told him he had already received appropriate treatment and released him

A month after he was in the hospital, Whitten was hit by something else: a huge ambulance bill.

Whitten was charged $12,872.99 for the six-mile ride from one hospital to the next. That price included $11,670.11 for the base ride, $737.16 for the six miles (that's almost $123 per mile), $314.45 for an EKG and another $151.27 for something referred to as "infection control."