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.