I have a friend who was hospitalized on December 30th and released on January 2nd. And that's how they hit their max out of pocket two times over the course of 4 days.
It's an awful edge case. If they'd gotten terrible vertigo a couple days earlier or later, it would have cost them half as much.
but of course in practice, most US healthcare consumers don't really have an actual choice about who they buy their healthcare from.
I knew a guy. In 2008 his wife's company went under. So lost the health insurance she'd had for 15 years. No COBRA and in 2008 no ACA either. Her gall bladder got infected and they had to put a second mortgage on their house. Both of them had been paying for insurance for 25 years at that point.
Me I didn't have health insurance between 18 and 40 when I started working for a big corp. Two years later racked up $50k in medical bills. Insurance paid almost all of it.
Crazy.