MSNBC host Chris Hayes assured his audience Wednesday that he was still smart and sophisticated despite his inability to read a hospital bill.
Hayes issued this assurance as he and guest Ezekiel Emanuel discussed the story of a not-so-smart man who was hospitalized after trying to take a picture with a rattlesnake. The man amassed $153,000 in hospital bills due to his ill-starred selfie, the New York Daily News reports:
His statement balance of $153,161.25 is listed as due on July 27 and does not list any insurance company as attributing to the payments, at least immediately.
The largest chunk of his bill, making up approximately 54%, is attributed to "pharmacy."
KGTV reported that Fassler depleted antivenin supplies at two local hospitals during his five-day stay.
Hayes and his guest agreed that the story illustrated that hospital bills were too expensive and hard to understand.
"You have put your finger on something that drives me insane personally, in my own life," Hayes said. "I consider myself a fairly smart individual. I consider myself relatively erudite—"
"Yes!" Emanuel said. "You don't have to prove it, Chris—we agree."
Hayes recalled how he had devoted his prodigious intelligence and erudition to understanding hospital bills in the past.
"I cannot make sense out of hospital bills," Hayes said. "Months and months and months after my second child was born things would show up in the mail. It would be this inscrutable nonsense spreadsheet that I would devote all my cognitive capacity to and come up completely empty about what the heck was going on."
Hayes is well-known for his intellectual curiosity and smart takes on the issues of the day. Hayes also once said that part of embracing soccer in this country was "accepting the fact the U.S. cannot simply assert its dominance," and he did not mind last year when he was pelted with rocks by Ferguson protesters.