[ericmay]

There are a couple of things I think are important to point out that does make this not just mad but annoying too.

1. No hospital will leave you (because of decency and federal law) to die if you can't pay. This right here obliterates any justification for private health insurance unless said insurance is mandatory like it is in a country such as Switzerland. When someone like the OP inevitably gets injured and has a $370,000 bill or something they go bankrupt and then society has to pay for it. If OP and others were willing to let themselves and others die on the street outside of a hospital I would be at least a little more sympathetic toward their decision to have or not have health insurance.

2. Health insurance is basically a jobs program in the United States. Health insurers do not provide value or innovate. What they do is became defect state agencies with private profits attached, and then when they decide they aren't paying for something we still end up with the bill anyway (both personally and as a society). My main gripe here is that because of the way we've structured our society, we're basically bankrolling a private industry and protecting its profits for no added value. At least the defense industry actually builds things for us. We could eliminate these insurance companies, their profits, and those jobs, and overnight our healthcare costs would go down and everyone would be insured and the economy would be better off too.

[ceejayoz]

> No hospital will leave you (because of decency and federal law) to die if you can't pay.

Yes, they will. The legal requirement (under EMTALA) is to provide emergency screening and care until stabilized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nataline_Sarkisyan

"UCLA declined two livers while waiting for insurance approval from Cigna. Sarkisyan's family was also informed that they could proceed with the transplant if they could make a down-payment of $75,000."

[ericmay]

Stabilization and emergency care are exactly not leaving you to die.

[ceejayoz]

They won't give you months worth of chemo, or a liver transplant. You will die without them, but the hospital has no legal obligation to prevent that in these cases. You can keep coming back to the ER, getting progressively sicker and sicker, and they'll give you fluids, pain meds, treat acute symptoms, and then refer you to an oncologist or surgeon, who won't treat you further without knowing it's gonna be paid for.

I've provided a very concrete example of how this plays out.

[ericmay]

Yes but the concrete example of how this plays out doesn't contradict what I said. If you wanted to contradict what I said you would find an example where someone showed up to the ER and the hospital said sorry we're not treating you because you can't pay, and then they died outside of the hospital or in the waiting room. And even then you'd have to find a number of examples to establish a pattern.

Also once you reach the point that you are describing that is typically when state resources kick in. If you become sick enough (for example with cancer) you go on Medicaid and disability. I recently went through this exact process with my mom. It wasn't fun and boy do the spam and scam calls really add to the experience. Why we tolerate this crap in America is absolutely bewildering.