>>I'm currently reading "Predictably Irrationaly" (by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist) and one chapter describes experiments in which people think a more expensive drug gives them more pain relief than a cheaper drug; of course, in the experiment, it's the same thing.
That's more of a US phenomenon: for Viv and his daughter needing emergency service, he's unlikely to know the price tag or even to have thought about it and any pain relief prescribed for her has no differential pricing cues. Perhaps Viv can tell us- but affordability and cost probably didn't get even a moment's attention during his daughter's whirlwind treatment to get her home by tomorrow. I'm fairly sure Viv commented on that Commonwealth study that put the NHS first in the free world, so that's a model worth emulating IMHO: do we really want parents worrying about price or whether her treatment is expensive enough to represent quality when she is about to disappear into the OR?
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1