As he sat in a hospital bed, attached to an IV and wearing a neck brace, Whitten said, doctors told him that because he had suffered a traumatic injury, they had to send him by ambulance to the city’s only trauma center, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

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

Then the bill came.

$12,872.99 for a 6-mile ambulance ride between hospitals: a $11,670.11 base rate, $737.16 for mileage, $314.45 for EKG monitoring, and $151.27 for “infection control.”