I had an appendectomy when I was in college and I had insurance and I still received a bill for something like $8000 after the insurance paid out. I managed to have half of that removed due to my very low income, and I luckily was able to pay the rest of it, but this was literally the simplest possible ER visit and surgery you can have and I was lucky to have savings to cover it. If anything worse had happened to me (say, if I got hit by a car) then I could easily have ended up with more than $10k in debt after insurance and after the follow up negotiations with the hospital.
Some insurance would certainly have covered this better, but I had the more expensive of the 2 choices insurance plans that were offered to students at my school. Anyone who is buying their own insurance if it's not provided by their employer isn't going to do much better.
The world is complicated and now more than ever everything is interdependent.
you are very much to blame if you take risks and choose
not to pay for insurance, regardless how expensive it is.
The morality behind medical finance in the US is not nearly as clear cut as you think it is.
> "Well, it's beside the point."
It really isn't. It comes down to the core of the issue.
What we have is an industry that collectively charges many times the actual cost of delivering their service and have a monopoly on performing a critical service (licensing, certification). Whether or not this is acceptable hinges hugely on whether or not you believe access to this service is a fundamental right.
There is no way, for example, that we would accept a similar situation if the product in question was fresh water or air.
The common public loves to simplify problems, as it makes things easier to comprehend. I think this leads us to this huge partisan gaps in beliefs in this country. Both sides are guilty of boiling down complex problems to a level where people think they "understand" the problem. Unfortunately, there are many more actors, causes, and effect behind the scenes that must be accounted for. It's not a simple cause and effect, Doctors must get paid, argument.