People just love to talk about how horrible the US healthcare system is but my disabled daughter has never paid a dime for care in her life (in Kansas, of all places!) via Medicaid. Even her birth was free due to retroactive Medicaid. Her 9 months in the NICU was billed at over $2 million. Thanks taxpayers.
I was having chest pains last week and got triaged within minutes at the ER. I’m pretty sure I “owe” them $500 for a previous ER visit which nobody mentioned during my stay.
My 65 year old uncle hasn’t had insurance in 20 years but when he got cancer three ago the social worker helped him sign up for disability and they got him on Medicare so fast your head would spin. He started chemo basically immediately and while his cancer is terminal the treatment has kept him alive for a long time, even longer than the doctors predicted.
My wife got billed $200,000+ for a visit in the hospital when she had a critical illness and almost died. She ended up paying $2000. This was more than ten years ago and it didn’t ruin her credit and nobody ever came after her for it.
And One more. The hospital messed up the billing for our first daughter’s birth and called us two years later saying we didn’t have insurance (we did). My wife said that was their problem. We never heard from them again or got a bill. I guess they just ate the cost? No idea. But it was over seven years ago and there were zero consequences and we never paid a dime.