Cancer or a car wreck shouldn’t bankrupt anybody, so let’s make a deal: let’s all pay each other’s medical bills.
Most nations do that with universal health care. We Americans kinda do that for old people and poor people (though Republicans are pulling back on that help), but instead of paying attention to international examples and our own research and implementing single-payer for everyone else, we still leave most of the working class to rely on a complicated and expensive mishmash of private insurance whose profitability depends on denying services to paying customers as often as their arcane contracts will allow.
And when they can afford private insurance, sickness and injury still put Americans in deep medical debt:
About a third of working-age adults with private insurance said that they were paying off medical bills or debt over time. Rates were highest among people with moderate or low income, women, Black and Hispanic people, and residents of southern states.
…Most people who have medical debt carry a lot of it: 46 percent of working-age adults paying off health care bills or medical debt over time reported loads of $2,000 or more. This means an estimated 15 percent of all U.S. working-age adults with private insurance are carrying medical debt of more than $2,000 [Sara R. Collins, Carson Richards, Avni Gupta, and Shreya Roy, “How Medical Bills and Debt Impact Americans with Private Insurance,” Commonwealth Fund, 2026.09.17].
Grappling with the medical debt that private insurance doesn’t cover causes immediate and long-lasting harms:
Families dealing with medical debt suffer emotionally and financially, and many avoid getting needed health care after their experience. In our survey, two-thirds (68%) of people with unpaid medical bills said it caused worry and anxiety, 30 percent delayed or avoided needed health care, and 30 percent cut back on basic living necessities, including food, heat, or rent.
The economic ramifications of paying off accumulated medical bills had long-lasting effects for many, including the depletion of savings and lower credit ratings. More than a third of people used up all or part of their savings to pay for medical bills or debt. When health care providers refer medical debt to collection agencies, it may be reported to credit bureaus and can negatively affect people’s credit scores [Collins et al., 2026.09.17].
We could keep saddling ourselves with medical debt and scrambling to GoFundMe when someone gets a brain tumor or hurt fighting a fire, but why leave ourselves immersed in the red and dangling in the uncertainty of Internet attention? Why not adopt the system Canada and other civilized nations have adopted: we all pay taxes, and when any of us get sick or injured, our taxes pay the medical bills. You still have to struggle with your physical and emotional recovery, but that struggle need not be compounded with financial recovery.
Remember when most health insurance policies were only one year long?
At that end of that year, it was up to the insurance company if they wanted to continue your policy or not.
Republicans and business creeps had no problem with this.
“It’s their company and their right to run it as they please. The “market” will work it out.”
At that point in 2001 ~ 667,000 of us were filing medical bankruptcy a year, including me.
Now my credit rating is 815.
Yeah, the coat of many colors health care we have is crazy. Its going to take quite a move to get health care for all. Lots of work. More educated doctors would help they have to be on board. We approach everything the wrong way. Obamacare was really just adjusting Republican ideas into the mix in the hopes they would go along with it. Republican’s are just stupid on this issue so that has to be dealt with too. 2028 and a good trifecta is necessary.
It’s said the only reason universal health care came to England was because of a tragedy and it’ll take the same, here. The Nazis wiped out everything with bombs and universal was the cheapest way to rebuild.
But Obamacare fixed that!!! Saved every household $2500 per year!!!
If you want to see a few facets of this mess, you need to look at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington. I worked there for 4 years in the 1970s.
First of all it’s Bernie Sanders’ home town. He was the mayor there, in the 80s. He knows what’s been going on there.
Anyway, it’s Vermont’s biggest medical center, and only a 90 minute drive from Montreal, where the best medical center in the entire nation of Canada was located, at McGill University.
For years, if you googled “UVM Medical Center + Canadian Patients” you saw the deal: 30% discount for cash, they were courting Canadian patients, offering the care they couldn’t get at McGill under their socialized medical system. This pattern can be seen in all the medical centers across our northern border. Canada has a two tier system: if you have money you can access the care you need in the USA. if you don’t have money, you stay home and wait your turn. UVM Med was all about those international patients. But with Medicaid expansion, it seems there are not enough wealthy Canadians to keep things afloat.
In just in the last few days, the UVM medical center is in trouble financially, laying off staff, cutting services. . Can’t pay the bills, and the problem is Medicaid.
25% of Vermont’s population is on Medicaid, twice the percentage we have enrolled in Medicaid in SD. Medicaid seems to have a tipping point.
When too many people are enrolled in Medicaid, there aren’t enough privately insured patients to pay the bills.
So I looked west at New York, where 35% of the population is on Medicaid. Most of the hospitals there are in financial trouble, in the red or barely breaking even, cutting services, etc..
I worked at the Albany Medical Center, where I wored after leaving Vermont. Nice place. My first child was born there.
Still open in spite of having an operating margin of -13.1%: Net patient revenue -$1.26 Billion
They have a plan to turn this around by 2030.
Maybe they are hoping for more Canadians? Or just cutting more services? Some talk of “consolidation with other hospitals. Shut down a bunch of them? That’s how school consolidation works.
But, you say, you don’t want Medicaid for all, you want Medicare.
Medicare is expensive.,Those of us who are on it prepaid for Part A with our payroll taxes. If you didn’t prepay, (like my mom, who was a Stay at home mom) you have to buy it. Then you have to pay for Part B which is mandatory, Part D is optional.
And because Medicare pays very little of the charges filed (25-30% usually) everybody on Medicare has to buy a supplemental insurance plan. Some people make the mistake of getting a Medicare Advantage plan. That’s another Bad Idea, but I won’t go into that here.
I just looked at this after it was posted and the hyphen (negative sign) on the Albany Medical Center’s net patient revenue was split between the lines. The Albany Medical Center’s net patient revenue is Negative $1.26 billion
America has decided health care is a privilege — not a right. And as a free-market society, as with any commodity, fair game to make as much profit from as possible.
Americans concerned for their health or actually sick are nothing but another resource to be mined for profit.
Somebody has to pay for it.
I am 76, have a BMI of 23, never smoked, don’t use alcohol, blood pressure runs about 125/70 at any given time.
I eat a lot of broccoli and salmon.
Medical problems are caused or exacerbated by lifestyle choices. That’s just a fact. You either go to the trouble to take care of yourself, or you self-destruct.
if somebody chooses self-destruction, why should the healthy taxpayers pay for it??
Raise the taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and sugar-loaded soft drinks if you want the government to pay for everybody’s medical care.. so those of us who don’t buy those things will not have to foot the bills for those who do.
Just a bit too much generality there Anngebra. People get sick for many reasons besides being slobs.
Sure, there’s a growing movement among Democrats and others to fund Medicare for all but this interested party likes the idea of rolling the funding for Obamacare, TriCare, Medicare, the Indian Health Service and the Veterans Health Administration together then offering Medicaid for all by increasing the estate tax, raising taxes on tobacco and adopting a carbon tax. Yes, socialized agriculture, socialized dairies, socialized cheese, socialized livestock production, a socialized timber industry, socialized air service, socialized freight rail, a socialized nursing home industry, socialized water systems and now a socialized internet are all fine with Republicans in South Dakota but then they insist single-payer medical insurance is socialized medicine.
I cannot pay another’s health care bills. My money has already gone to pay for the electric bills of AI/datacenters, the cleaning up of oil corporation environmental disasters, the hoarded wealth of the investor class, the bail outs of banks and unlucky farmers. I also find my own health costs burdensome I simply have no more to give.