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.
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.
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.