Have you been to a hospital ER? Unless you are literally dying, you will be sat in a chair and handed a clipboard of papers to fill out before anyone with medical training looks at you. And one of those forms will be a financial agreement.
And I can't leave a comment like that without addressing the inevitable reply about the current state of healthcare, so to clarify, the current state of healthcare in the US is also the fault of the federal government for a bevy of reasons - most notably, incentivizing workplace health insurance that removed insurance coverage from the consumer market entirely, removing its costs and the natural market response to them and simultaneously removing the cost of healthcare itself from that same marketplace.
The federal government has what I like to call a financial firehose that it aims at different problems and every time it aims that firehose, things get worse. Whether we are talking about healthcare, farming, higher education or housing...everything just gets more bloated and expensive when you remove price from discouraging demand in the basic economics of supply and demand.