"Carol?" Amy asked, looking up from the dinner table. "I… want to check something, before I go any further with it. Is that okay?"
Carol looked up at her, then smiled. "I suppose so, Amy. This isn't going to be a legal discussion, is it?"
"It… sort of is," Amy replied. "Financial, anyway. I've, well – I was doing some research about something at lunchtime, after a comment while I was at the hospital."
"This is news to me, Ames," Victoria said. "I'm surprised you didn't ask me for help."
"I wanted to make sure it might work before I actually went through with it," Amy replied. "I didn't want to bother you, either."
She took a deep breath, then exhaled.
"So… I looked at how much money the average patient makes a hospital," she said. "From their insurance, fees and so on. The amount of gross income that the hospital makes, the amount they're paid, before taxes and costs and stuff."
Carol nodded. "Right, but I don't understand why. Unless this is about the time you spend at the hospital?"
"It is a bit," Amy replied. "Not completely, but a bit?"
She frowned. "Or… more like a lot, I guess. Sorry, I'm a bit scatterbrained about this, because I've been thinking about it for weeks and it's actually coming up… so I looked up that, and I looked up NEPEA-5."
"You're not thinking of going into business, are you?" Carol asked. "You know there's laws that prevent that."
"They… actually don't," Amy corrected her. "Not quite. They mean there's extra fees, and taxes, and fines for non-compliance with all kinds of awkward rules. But they don't actually make it illegal to make money as a non-affiliated cape – just hard."
"Like Parian," Victoria said. "You know, Mom. She's a Rogue."
"Exactly," Amy confirmed. "And – hold on a second."
She got out her phone. "So, uh… I made some really conservative estimates with this, to make sure I wasn't going to commit to something based on false information."
Carol nodded, a little reluctantly. "It's good you've done the research, at least."
Amy smiled, briefly, then checked her phone. "So… ah, here we are. So I assumed two hours a day, ten patients per hour, even though I could easily do twice that in both cases, and the typical values I found for per-patient gross income I reduced down to about 33% of the original number. And then I assumed that the NEPEA-5 costs would amount to 95% of gross income before tax, which is the kind of numbers that even the Elite doesn't use in their propaganda and would be enough to completely cripple any parahuman business… almost."
Victoria leaned over to look at Amy's phone, then fell off her chair, and only avoided a crash-landing by starting to fly.
"Victoria Dallon!" Carol said. "What was that about?"
"I saw the numbers, Mom," Victoria defended herself. "They're… big."
"How big?" Carol asked.
"Average per-patient gross income in my sample is one hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars per discharge," Amy replied. "I used fifty thousand. Ten patients per hour, two hours per day, twenty patients so one million dollars per work day. Three hundred and forty work days per year, divided by twenty by NEPEA-5 costs, seventeen million dollars before tax."
Carol fell off her chair.
"How much?" she asked. "Seventeen million… even after those assumptions? Even on only fifty thousand a patient… when you can cure cancer?"
"I was surprised as well," Amy said. "But the math checks out. I did it twice. And… I realized something, after I worked it out."
She looked worried. "Carol, I've been donating my time to the hospital. Have I been wrecking the whole healthcare economy in the state?"
"I'd be almost more worried if you haven't been," Carol admitted, picking her chair up. "Because that would mean the hospital was picking up all that excess value – before the NEPEA-5 costs. If they haven't been declaring several hundred million dollars of extra value per year, value that isn't matched by costs beyond administration… this could either bankrupt the hospital or send people to prison."
Max Anders picked up his phone.
"Anders," he said.
"Max, it's Victor," his subordinate replied. "We might have a problem."
"How bad?" Max replied. "Do I need to come down to discuss it in person?"
"You might," Victor said. "Panacea's announced she's going to go into independent business, rather than going through Brockton General."
Max's mouth formed words for a moment.
Medhall's main way of making money at the moment was selling 'experimental treatments' to Brockton General and laundering money through Panacea's enormous distorting impact on the hospital finances.
If that wasn't an option-
"Fuck," he said.
"That's about what I thought," Victor agreed. "What do we do?"
Max briefly entertained the fantasy of having Panacea shot, but that would be far, far too blatant. The PRT would tear Brockton General down looking for an Empire Eighty-Eight connection, and they'd find one in the hospital finances.
"Fuck knows," he said, eventually. "Can we even go back to our main financial model from three years ago?"
"Good question," Victor said. "I'll make some calls."
AN:
This is a take on Amy colliding with NEPEA-5, based on calculating out how much money Amy would actually make if she was getting the money from her work.