Not that I recall, but that situation could happen to you if you had employer or government provided coverage.
>Or have an expensive pre-existing condition?
No, but there are other options like health-shares. These are usually tied to religious organizations and works almost exactly like health insurance, pooling costs. Obamacare grandfathered in existing health shares but made it illegal to start new ones.
>There's certainly an element of luck involved, especially when it comes to the US healthcare system!
There's a certain element of luck to life in general. I'm certainly not dismissing the unfortunate souls you're referring to, but we equally should not pretend like these things are all that difficult for the average person to do.
Not specifically to you but this conversation is highly interesting because it demonstrates the two different attitudes - one from the person you were replying to and one from pretty much everyone else.
In software engineering it is the attitude of people who come up with a solution to their problem as compared to the attitude of the people who are complaining that the solution is not general enough and therefore should not be considered a solution.
It feels to me that our minds have been atrophied by generations of being told that we can't do anything. Forget budgeting a small business, we can't even budget for our own family. Someone else, be it the government or our employer, has to provide some universal solution to all my problems like saving for retirement or being able to buy an antibiotic for my kid. So someone presents a solution, and rather than being able to take that, adjust it to our individual needs, our psyche is so weak that we just sit back and try to figure out all the ways we can avoid taking agency in our own lives, we need big brother to solve it for us.
Ultimately it's perhaps the same thing though. In your scenario people want to pick apart the solution so they can return back to deciding that their employer or the government has to provide a solution for them.
One guy is living life probably pulling in upwards of $150,000 a year (or living in a lower cost of living place with six figures income). Simply budgeting well will cover all these things. And another thinks that "budgeting" means you don't get to eat on Mondays so you can keep on bills.
Person 2: But what if you're a diabetic blind one legged cancer patient?
Buying your own workman's comp is 0.0075% of your salary in my state ($0.75 per $100 in salary). Disability insurance is $30/mo for $50k salary, so if you're making $30k/yr then disability will be even less. You can make a budget, avoid consumer debt, and save an emergency fund at virtually any level of income. The median national income is $32k/yr for a single person. Sure, a lot of people making that kind of money also have bad personal finance habits. But the idea that it's impossible to live a decent life on the kind of income that half of all single people in the country are making is hyperbole.
[1] https://www.floridawc.com/workerscompensation/policy/rates/
Here's my personal experience - I had a single parent who always worked and always had health insurance through her employer. In her 50s she got hurt and couldn't work much (no cobra, no money either) and lost her insurance. She worked in retail for a while. Then she got cancer and died. Maybe if she'd had more frequent checkups it might have been caught earlier? Maybe less stress would have helped? Who knows. I think if we had national health insurance or health insurance you can't lose, then a lot of people wouldn't face this problem, it would help in the aggregate. She never got to 65, so she didn't jump onto the safe medicare.
Whether or not there are improvements to be made to our healthcare system is an entirely different discussion than whether or not an average, able bodied person could reasonably go out on their own without another person working in the home to back them up financially. Of course it would be better/easier to have a support system with another worker in the house. Of course it would be better if you had easier access to healthcare. I would never suggest otherwise.
Also, I'm sorry for your loss. My mother is a cancer survivor and it's just a shit situation all the way through.