Thank you all for your responses, that's definitely reassuring though there seems to be a common theme to avoiding poverty cause it's hard to get back on your feet. Well, that's probably true everywhere so...

By the way, when I was talking about going bankrupt I meant despite having health insurance but often you see cases where the insurance only covers accidents that happened 'while on a red or green bus going no more that 30mph at night, full moon required'. Reductio ad absurdum obviously but I think you know what I mean (probably yet another stereotype I have about US).

This shows another feature of life in America - it depends on which "team" you're on. Working for a large employer, especially with a white collar job, you generally get a better policy. While you're insignificant, your employer (who is buying the insurance and defining the policy) is valuable to the insurer, so you're treated better. Same for if your insurance company is a big player in that metro area - they get pricing power vs hospitals and providers so your coverage and exceptions tend to be better.

The crap insurance with lots of exceptions come a) if you're choosing it yourself and paying low premiums, or b) if your employer is less profitable per employee or you're in a low status job (e.g. Wal-Mart offers worse coverage than Google)

Hmm... this contradicts everything everyone else said in this thread. I mean, everyone says that if you have insurance you have no chance of going bankrupt but it is not enough, you have to be insured for enough money in a first place, which I think might not be possible even for non-poor people and that defeats the purpose. And it's very scam prone...

My apologies in advance if that seems overly critical of US, I understand why it might look like it but, truly, it's one of those things I just cannot grasp about living there and that's why I'm asking questions, no malice intended.

I paid accident claims for over 5 years. Only a tiny percentage were a case of wrong place, wrong time, shit happens. The vast majority were either accidents waiting to happen or policy abuse, where policyholders were essentially scamming the company completely legally to cover routine chiropractic visits.

My mother is German. I have lived in Europe. I will suggest that the fact that you are European will likely inoculate you against a lot of worst case scenarios because normal American practices that promote disease and injury simply are not part of your culture.

Diet plays a very large role in disease. Immigrants don't typically start living off of fast food burgers. They continue eating largely like they did at home.

Europeans tend to drink responsibly. They have wine with dinner or drinks with friends at a pub. The US has rampant addiction problems killing people.

If you don't plan to abandon your current healthy lifestyle habits, suddenly start drinking and driving just because you set foot on US soil and otherwise abandoning all common sense as you have known it for your entire life, you probably don't need to fear that taking an American job will trap you in American medical poverty hell with no hope of escape.

You can email me if you want to talk further.

Yeah, I want to talk further, It's 4am in Poland though, would you be willing to postpone it a little bit? Thanks in advance

No problem. Email me whenever.