It always bothers me when blogs don't include the person name's in the title and just refer to them as "YouTuber". It's less egregious when it's social media like Reddit, but it's different when it's the way they earn a living.
That's the first sentence of the article. Doesn't that cover that pretty well?
And that's after insurance. The full price is unthinkable to me - most people would be ruined for years.
The article states in addition to the x-ray that "the bill included an abdominal CT scan, medication, and two nights in a hospital room". American hospitals are full of multimillion dollar equipment and trained specialists staffed around the clock.
"The full price" is a fiction relevant only to negotiation of actual price between providers and government/institutional payers, no individual ever pays that. It's an imaginary number used to start price discovery so that the hospital, insurance companies and critically the government medicare/medicaid program can make some set of concessions and discounts so that in the end everyone comes to a "win-win" agreement.
The point of my comment is that $69k was apparently deemed to be sufficiently more outrageous and hence clickbait worthy such that it incentivized the writer to lie about the facts.
The fact that you can often negotiate when you have a large debt that you are unlikely to pay does not change the fact that the debt is legitimate
I don't think it's related to trying to devalue 'YouTuber' as a profession.
If someone works in legacy media, like network and cable television, printed newspaper or magazine, and they don't clearly see the shift away from print and broadcast media to Internet video, then they're totally behind the curve, and they doing exactly what you always see people in dying prominent institutions do - struggle to maintain relevancy using any method possible. In this case, I would argue, "downplaying" so-called "new media" people.
Sam Harris said it best when explaining why he doesn't make book writing his focus any longer: "I can reach 100,000 people by writing a book, which will take about a year from idea to published hardcover, or I can record a podcast, which will take a day, and reach 500,000 people."