> you could be bankrupted by it
It's tough to be an expert, to be well informed on how US medical care gets paid for. I'm no expert, but I know a little more than nothing:
So, for "bankrupted", yes, sort of ....
But the US has Hill-Burton hospitals, likely named after two guys in Congress who got the bill passed. With the Hill-Burton act, if are starting a hospital, then can get funding via the act. BUT: Have to accept all patients independent of ability to pay. Soooo, a large fraction of city hospitals are Hill-Burton. Then there are the medical school teaching-research hospitals -- again commonly or always, patients are accepted independent of ability to pay.
If someone really is broke, then they can qualify for Medicaid -- "never receive a bill for medical care."
For people old enough to be retired, there is Medicare. Part A covers a major fraction of hospital charges and is free. Part B covers physician charges, and is not free, maybe a few $hundred a month. There is another part for drugs.
For poor people, there is the HRSA (Federal Health Resources Services Administration) or some such -- clinics with sliding scale charges based on ability of patients to pay.
It goes on this way. It's a patchwork system. Not all the important details are really clear. E.g., there is a lot of over billing, that is, charging too much, and in this case the insurance company has a talk with the physician/hospital and negotiates lower charges. For drugs, the prices can vary enormously based on whatever.
There has been at least one effort to get the medical providers to publish a price list, i.e., to clear up the lack of cost information.
I don't know all the details, but my understanding is that it is very rare for medical care charges actually to bankrupt someone.
E.g., one approach is for a patient who owes big bucks to pay, say, $10 a month for 6 years -- then by laws of debts, the rest owed is forgiven, that is, not owed.
One way and another, in summary, from 50,000 feet up, generally, the US tries really hard not to have all of medical care run by the Federal government, or any level of government. E.g., there could be a system single payer where the there is only one entity that pays for anything about medical care; of course, that entity likely is run by the Federal government and gets a lot of tax money. Single payer has been proposed 220,872,879 times and rejected by that many times.
Some of the scare is that single payer would result in some or all of (a) taxes way too high, (b) too much just wasteful, silly, and unneeded medical care, (c) low quality of care and, thus, too many people hurt or dead, (d) too little capacity where too many patients die from waiting too long for care, etc. I don't know what if anything is right/wrong with (a) -- (d), but these are concerns commonly voiced.
Maybe the US could borrow from, at least learn from, Switzerland, England, ....
But actually bankrupt from just losing a job? I suspect that is actually not very common.
Oh, by the way, if fired, then commonly get to continue medical insurance coverage for some length of time.