It's not like your friend is trying to scam you or anything. That money is actually going to a bill that they are required to pay. Most people I talk to don't even know they can negotiate hospital bills.
Seems weird to act like your friend or GoFundMe is the villain here, when the issue is really a healthcare system that has a "secret menu".
> The ER bill was about $50k and she decided that the best way to pay it was by creating a GoFundMe campaign before she even tried to negotiate with the hospital or fight it with the insurance.
For me it sounds like she could have done more on her own to solve this problem before “socializing” the solution.
PS: Yes, healthcare is broken but at the end, she as a resident knows that and when someone comes to visit it is her responsibility to advise or buy a travelers insurance. It is not that expensive.
It's prohibitively expensive for a wide range of people not in perfect health.
Travel insurance for older people with prior conditions can be expensive. My parents visited the US for a few weeks and their insurance cost something like $800 with a $500 deductible. Wasn't even that good either, with a stack of pages with terms and conditions. Fortunately they didn't have to use it.
It goes without saying that the healthcare system is completely broken, but that doesn't justify above behavior.
She might get mails and phone calls but the collection agency will not go after her assets, well unless her dad has assets in the USA.
The story lacks some details but if she contact the hospital and negotiate based on that, they would likely reduce the bill. Is this moral or not that’s another question, but I agree that she had few options before asking people for money early on. Specially when making 200k.
But you are OK if other well-meaning people pay? If you make 200k you can take the hit and you should have known better.
Actually, there is- it's when the socialized system decides they're good enough, and stops trying.
There is literally no way a private company could offer something cheaper and better than the government?
Obviously in practice that's not how things work out, so in most cases private companies end up moving faster, leveraging efficiencies, utilising innovation better, and generally being cheaper. The lesson shouldn't be that means the government shouldn't provide services though, but rather that the government should act more like a business and do things businesses do to be competitive.
It's very noticeable that when government does this it works really well. The UK government has brought a lot of it's web and IT services in-house in the past decade, and they're so much better now.
And no... there is no way that a private company could offer something cheaper because both entities function the same way except that a private company also has to make a profit. Governments are not profit-making entities. Take whatever method a private company has to make something cheaper and remove profit and you have something the government can handle.
Industries like healthcare are plagued with government interference. Some regulations are important. Many just serve as a moat around the oligopoly that is the current private health Care system.
You're either being intentionally obtuse or you're intentionally being misleading for some reason. This isn't rocket science. If two things are equal and one has the requirement to also generate profit, there's no way the other can possibly cost more.
My comment has nothing to do with my opinion on the cost of medical services in the US. If you would like that, I think the Affordable Care Act used up a very rare opportunity for improvement to put us into a worse situation. What we really needed was a public option for the private companies to compete with.
Here in California our subsidized option, Covered California, was horrendous, at least at launch. Also, subsidized was not enough to help, and the subsidization counted as taxable income which was a slap in the face for those who needed it.
Secondly, it sounds like you are making assumptions about her overall financial status, based on what you know about her current salary.
She might have substantial student debt, medical debt, spousal debt, be upside-down on a mortgage, have other family that she is supporting financially, etc.
Just knowing someone's salary doesn't provide a very clear picture of their overall financial status.
This is not to detract from your comment about the system being broken