One medical emergency and your credit will be ruined. Wait a seven years without contracting the debt collector and the debt becomes uncollectible. After three years roughly three quarters of the effect on your credit will evaporate. That's what actually happens beyond the hyperbolic political grandstanding.
Remember kids, if you get a bill that you can't possibly pay. Don't pay it. Let it go to collections and pay it for pennies on the dollar (another trick, tell them the most you can pay is $10 a month or something else low. Pay off that debt in 2075) or just wait for it to become uncollectible.
Source: Canadian, walked away from my student loan debt after injury, provincial loan was wiped clean federal loan had to be paid off. Student Visa wiped clean. To be clear I could not work and the bills kept getting harder and harder to pay. I was dying with stress and anxiety about bills. So I stopped paying them and bought food instead. I was young and not prepared for emergencies but it was clear I was sinking. I would like to also add this is NOT a great solution if you can avoid it. Responsible spending is. With the debt, for 7 years I could not get a credit card or take out a loan. If my car died I had to buy a new one right now out of pocket for work. It is not good. So though I had about 20000$ in provincial loans wiped it took me over a decade to pay off the rest of my debt. Today I am 100% debt free and even have a few dollars. The difference in stress levels I live day to day are huge I can not understate how much responsible spending with in your means can do for a person.
Do you owe the debt to American Express? It depends on the state in the US, they can sue you, and try to garnish wages and take assets that way. But some states have laws against things like wage garnishing, it also costs money to sue some one. So if $costToSue > $expectedDebtRecovery they aren't going to sue. They usually just sell the debt to a collections agency who just calls you relentlessly trying to get you to pay, and since the collection agency bought the debt so cheap, they aren't going to throw more costs to collect the money by suing. If they can get any money out of you just by calling, it's a win for them.
This advice is extremely glib and more of a headache than you're is making it out to be. Sure, there's techniques for deal with this shit. It doesn't change the fact that that it's still a giant pile of shit to deal with, and it would just be much better if we as a collective society didn't allow one medical emergency to cause problems for you of this magnitude.
Also, if you're trying to be your own business and your credit is ruined, what do you think happens to that business? My guess? OP was right, and he has to end it all.
Generally nothing, the hospitals don't actually expect you to pay the bill they just want the tax write off they get when they send it to collections. Jeff Bezos might have to pay but if you are just some guy with a business that doesn't even generate enough money to pay for your own health insurance you will most likely be fine.
Where will you live? In my area you need good credit to get an apartment...
Credit affects your life in many ways, I’m not advocating a specific action, just pointing out that the advice above can have negative effects on your life.
The people lauding the wonderful beautified “universal healthcare” (which, btw, they lied to you about never wanting to implement during pre-Obama care con job that made the Health sector rich and the middle class poorer) do t ever actually account all the costs when discussing it, and I will just assume you are doing the same from a point of ignorance, and not intentional deception.
Here is a representative example of a wonderful splendrous worker with universal healthcare in Europe.
1), as surveys here too show, for the same job, you’ll be making about 50-75% the salary of an American equivalent (see following points).
2) Your tax burden on that immensely lower income will be approaching 30% effective income tax (FYI, e.g., the 42% tax rat starts applying at €55,000, just for a reference point … and no, that is not a typo)
3) on that lower income and higher taxes amount, you then get to pay huge retirement taxes too, on the order of effectively approaching 20%, with heart wrenching and soul sucking outcomes when you see the “pension” people are given after a life of paying into an utterly incompetent and failed retirement system. For reference, think of paying into a retirement system at going on 20% of your income and then getting about 1/4 of your salary to live off in “retirement”. It’s sad and sick and immoral. If people had been able to simply invest their own money in a global fund, they would probably be swimming in money in retirement, but instead they were pillaged and plundered in order to give them a pittance in “retirement”. It’s really a morally bankrupted and depraved system.
4) so now that we’ve reduced your already lower income by around 50% from taxes and a con job retirement system, let’s talk about the health care system cost that will run you about €300 per month in employee costs every month just for a single person, not counting the employer contribution of another ~€900; again, for a single individual. And on top of that, you are also going to have copays to see the doctor (albeit about 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost in the USA, so you get to save $5-15), but you also get to go to a doctor for a prescription and a pharmacy to buy things like basic over the counter medications like ibuprofen .… that comes in blister packs of 20 you get “for free”(see tax burden and health insurance costs above for reference of level of “freeness”). Again, no, those are not typos or errors, they are very much representative examples.
4) gasoline is taxed at 100%, in most European countries or more, with talk of increasing it. And no, again, that is not a typo. For reference, in the USA gasoline is taxed at around the 20-25% range. The reason I mention that, is because it’s not only a taxation on mobility, it again sucks the disposable income of the lower income people dry.
And none of that even goes into the fact that medical care is determined by the insurance that pulls typical insurance things where when it’s time to pay out all the sudden the medical care is deemed not necessary.
The saddest thing about the health care cost debate is that it seems to be driven by a con job to trick people into a trap that will enslave them to authoritarian control even more without any benefits from it, if not only more detrimental effects like Obamacare that only served to drive up costs and then peg them at new levels that made health insurance companies and the medical sector richer, while Medicare fraud and pull pushing has run amok.
I actually find it curious that especially this community would not realize that the ideal system is not a centralized monolith running on a con job and no backups, but a highly competitive decentralized system forced to be transparent and accountable. But I guess whatever is driving the centralization of power and control among the tech tyrant FAANGs, seems to have also latched onto people’s minds here maybe.
Please excuse any errors because English is not my first language
Since we're ticking off items, Australia has both a public pension scheme and compulsory private retirement savings (superannuation). Taxes on petrol are higher than the US but lower than Europe.
I think you've been sucked in by the talking points, mate.
You may claim "is much cheaper", but reality is that you just don't know and are not being told the full cost of what you are being forced to pay for.
I don't know what you think you are explaining to me, the USA also has a public and private retirement planning system, and again, AUS is not exactly as bad off as Europe; but reality is that you don't see the freight train that is barreling down on you. The thing that makes the USA, AUS, and EU very very difficult to compare for even the supposed experts, is that there are so many modulating variables. Not only are they variables, but they qualitatively modulate things. For an example, you think your system works great in AUS and you have lower taxes and a public health care system that works ... what you don't consider, intentionally ignore, or are propagandized not to even be able to take in; are things like the fact that you don't have huge populations that drain the life, energy, focus, and money out of the USA by the billions. For example an estimate of the cost of various existing welfare programs in the USA ... not ones where you even get something at overpriced and inefficient rates like universal healthcare ... costs the American tax payer approaching the amount of the whole GDP of all of Australia. Think about that, the money equivalent of work, energy, and focus of the whole Australian economy, what every single man, woman, and child does in the economy; goes towards welfare programs to support people that are drains on society. They are even largely not only not contributors to society, spending a whole life of being a net overwhelming negative contributor, but increasingly they are not even American citizens that are draining the country.
The point is, you can sit there and chide big mean America for not providing health care, while also not having any idea what you pay for that, nor the overwhelming cost it would be to take care of everyone in the USA, in addition to the fact that you take for granted that the US tax payer funds the protection that keeps China from a full on invasion and even allows you to engage in free trade at the American tax payer's expense. And all that while you spit in American's face. Reality is that none of this math makes any sense or adds up in any manner when all the full accounting is done. Do you want to pay for the health care pampering of someone that chose to get morbidly obese while you lives healthy and saved your money instead of buying food with it? Reality is that if the USA were to adopt some universal healthcare system, it would bankrupt the USA and trigger a global economic collapse as all the fools don't realize just how dependent they are on the USA, and then they would also find themselves without the massive military that keeps them safe from others more than willing to conquer them when given the chance. Choices have consequences, my friend, and I do not think you have the ability to recognize the precarious situation the world is in as types like you keep sawing at the branch you are sitting on.
Of course this exact same thought process can be applied to other american 'quirks'. e.g. mass shootings and gun control.
But due to Medicare etc, it's not that big of a deal whether a worker is a contractor or employee.