But new techniques are surely fixing the situation, even if slowly, right? Nope! These days, many hospitals use teleradiology, a fancy term for outsourcing the interpretation of your scans and tests to workers (who may or may not have medical training) outside the hospital, anywhere from the next state over to India. This is especially popular in emergency medicine, because smaller hospitals don't want to keep a radiologist in their payroll just for the times Cousin Ronnie stumbles in with a cow-tipping injury.

This trend chips heavily at the doctors' diagnosis skills; in the old days, resident radiologists and ER doctors could consult each other on the fly about your symptoms and history as they relate to test results. Now, that X-ray of your butt is nothing but a context-free image on a screen in Pakistan, with no crucial patient information included. You don't need to be a doctor to realize that this leaves you wide open for a very unfortunate variation of Broken Phone.

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"Based off your X-rays, they'd like us to check you for possible ovarian bleeding."

What's Going on Here?

You know that time you ate at a taco joint and spent the remainder of the night hate-pooping your guts out because the guy behind the counter doesn't wash his hands? Well, it turns out your doctor doesn't, either.

Preventing most of the hospital-induced illnesses would be stupidly easy: Doctors and other staff just need to wash their hands between patients so that germs can't spread from one to another. The bad news is that they rarely bother doing this. It's estimated that only around 40 percent of hospital staff complies with hand-washing standards, despite the obvious, proven risk of transferring disease. Carefully placed disinfectant gel dispensers and washing sinks fill the hallways, and awareness projects in the vein of "January Is Let's Try to Kill Fewer Patients With Our Filth Month" are frequent. Alas, the medical professionals maintain a bullheaded "not gonna" attitude, which is fine for a 5-year-old but rather less amusing when displayed by the doctor who has your life in his dirt-encrusted hands.

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"That's not dirt."

The problem is so bad that there are special doctor wristbands that'll let people know whether the wearers have washed their hands sufficiently. Seriously. We're assuming the next step will be making non-complying doctors wear "I have poop on my hands!" badges.

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It turns brown.

The medical profession is one of those rare paths of employment where the word "old" isn't immediately followed with "fart." A lot of us prefer our authority figures with a little mileage -- just summon the mental image of an accomplished, white-haired senior doctor and one of a pimply, overworked intern and see which one you'd prefer as an emergency appendectomist.

You chose the old guy, didn't you? Bad move.

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Sorry, but the correct choice was "Contact-High Condoleezza Rice" in the back.

While the interns may sometimes mess up because they're inexperienced and overworked, the older doctors can be at least as dangerous because they don't keep their skills up to date. They've been on the job for a long time and know how it's done -- no young whippersnapper of a groundbreaking medical discovery is going to tell them otherwise, goshdarnit. As a result, the amount of time your doctor has been practicing medicine tends to correlate with lower quality care, and people getting complex surgery are more likely to die if older doctors are operating on them.

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"I'm sorry about your son. The leeches simply weren't strong enough."

Hey, did we mention that 20 percent of America's doctors today are over 65, and that percentage keeps rising?

What's Going on Here?

Unlike pilots and various other "people's lives are in my hands" occupations, doctors have no federally mandated retirement age. Not even surgeons. This allows many older doctors to keep going well past their mental prime, to the point where it's estimated that thousands of practicing doctors in America have full-blown dementia.

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"President Obama? It's a honor, sir."

That's not the real problem, though -- it's a telltale sign of trouble when your cardiologist tackles you to the ground and starts screaming that you're a Soviet spy. The real problem is that many older doctors are simply repeating what they learned in medical school back in the day, and obviously medicine, particularly surgery, has improved massively since then. Today, it involves modern humbug such as robots and lasers and decent odds for survival. Still, there's no standardized retraining system in place that makes doctors keep up with it. And while some older surgeons are diving scalpel-first into robot surgery, there are others who are sticking with the tried-and-true method they learned in 1971 from Hacksaw Harrison.

What's more, there's absolutely no way of telling how they will place you on the list. Many hospitals don't bother organizing according to the severity of the patient's condition (that is, by how much explaining it requires), but just slap 'em on the spreadsheet according to their bed number, room number, or just the alphabetical order of their name. This means Mr. Adams, cruising the ER for Vicodin, has a decent chance of ending up with more attention than Mr. Zerkowitz and his never-before-seen Tanzanian supervirus.

And if that seems kind of random, just wait until you get the bill ...

And if they can't come up with enough extra fees, they'll just inflate the actual ones. Hospitals have been caught charging people a 10,000 percent markup for ER-administered Tylenol, and over $1,200 for a blood test that actually costs about $39. It's not that these shenanigans are even difficult to track down: Medicare ensures that the hospitals are paid a specially calculated per-patient fee that covers the average price of a procedure, which tends to be several times lower than what they actually attempt to charge. The Medicare-determined reimbursement for the average "So you walked in through the ER door" fee, already an absurd $300, can turn into freaking $1,200 in the unforgiving innards of the hospital's billing machine.

So, why the hell are hospitals being so sneaky? As it turns out, they're not. When asked, hospitals are unreasonably honest about the whole business and freely admit that they overcharge. They're literally just throwing fiscal crap at a wall and seeing what sticks. You can have 10 different patients who all get the same procedure, and they get charged 10 wildly different prices.

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Some charge triple if they have alimony payments.

That's because the hospitals fully expect most of their clients (which are mostly insurance companies) to contest the bill to the point where they only pay a fraction of it. It's like the price at a used car lot -- they set it high because they expect you to haggle. The problem is that most uninsured people don't realize this, and hospitals aren't exactly rushing to tell them.

After all, these bills are often received by elderly or recuperating patients still confined to their beds, or by family members coping with a relative's cancer treatment. These people aren't very likely to go through a bill line by line, looking for the part where the ER charged them an $800 "not strangling you to death" fee. Then, a bunch of those patients will simply declare bankruptcy and never pay the bill at all, so the hospital has to make it up by trying to jack up the price on somebody else, like a game of hot potato where the loser is whoever doesn't have good lawyers. Hey, maybe it'll be you!

C. Coville's Twitter is here.

For more breakdowns in the system, check out The 5 Most Popular Safety Laws (That Don't Work) and 5 Popular Safety Measures That Don't Make You Any Safer.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 5 Ways We're Totally Ruining Kickstarter.

Related reading: Find out why getting a yearly physical makes you more likely to die young, #4 on the 5 Common Medical Procedures That Secretly Aren't Worth It. If you don't know the deadliest day to land in the hospital, its coming up, so read #8 in our 9 Most Statistically Terrifying Days on the Calendar. Of course, ambulances freaking explode all the time #5 of the 5 Terrifying Secrets About Riding in an Ambulance so you should just feel lucky to get there in one piece. And now to make room for all those new fears, we'll make a bunch of your stupidest fears disappear: you have a 96 percent chance of surviving a plane crash and are more likely to be killed by a cow than a shark.