[tvjunky]

The "middle class" you're referring to is literally everyone who has insurance. This has nothing to do with income. Non-payment is not the cause of the high prices. The system is broken in a number of ways. Premiums are a crazy percent of income, putting them out of reach for people who don't have employer subsidized plans. Even then, those employer subsidized plans get more expensive and provide less with each re-enrollment. Here is a small personal example of someone who works in tech for a very large enterprise and is lucky to have the means to handle it: I went to the ER for an issue, admitted for 6 days with a myriad of tests to diagnose. The total bill for that was over $100k. Even though I went to one hospital nearly, $40k of those billings were "out of network" and I had no choice in the matter. I easily met my high deductible but, there were still random bills "not covered". That made my part nearly 10k. This open enrollment period, my employer has decided to drop all "out of network" support because only 10% of the workforce used it in the past. So, if I were to have an issue like this again, my part would be in the neighborhood of $50k for a few test and few days in a bed. That's a scary prospect for a lot of people. For some, letting a bill like that go to collections may be their only option.

[StillBored]

Uh, despite what you have heard about the ACA (obamacare) it actually did do a number of good things. One of which is limit total yearly out of pocket. So if you have insurance (no matter how bad) your max out of pocket is capped.

For 2018 the individual limit was $7350,

https://obamacarefacts.com/health-insurance/out-of-pocket-ma...

Which granted is a _LOT_ if your making $30k a year, but its not the instant bankruptcy many people discovered themselves in after situations like yours where the out of pocket for "good insurance" could easily go over $100k for fairly limited hospital says.