[refurb]

I've been in a similar situation before. Employers who put this sort of stuff in their contracts are like landlords who say "you have to repaint the place on your own dime after 10 years of living there". They think they are being cleaver.

These employers don't want to go to court, they don't want to collect the debt, they just like scary language.

My employer threatened me with similar language, so I shrugged my shoulders and said "ok?".

Never heard of it again. They won't spend $20 to buy pizza for their employees, you think they'll spend money on lawyers?

[ianai]

You’re rolling the dice there on corporate attitude. If they’ve got lawyers on their payroll already it will just be standard cost of business to sue yet another employee. Or just straight up vindictiveness.

[ThrustVectoring]

You can't get blood from a stone, and there's no law that says you can't deliberately set up your finances to be maximally stone-like. IMO you should be doing this anyways so that the medical billing system can't decide to steal your life savings.

[refurb]

Pretty much. The older I get, the more I realize there are "rules" and then there is what people are actually willing to do.