Which begs the question: what happens if the premature baby is born to a US family that can't afford a decent insurance plan? Does the hospital repo the baby? Is the family bankrupt and the baby's life ruined from the get go just for being born premature? I can't wrap my head around it, and it seems to suck either way.

The parents are on the hook to the hospital, to the myriad physicians involved in the in-hospital care, and for non-covered post-discharge costs. Their financial lives may be crushed absent bankruptcy, which carries its own problems regarding loss of assets and mortgage availability for ex.

The infant is also financially liable but likely uncollectable. The baby's life may or may not be ruined depending on where the US goes w/r/t health insurance coverage for pre existing conditions.

How is the infant financially liable?

Maybe more civilized countries can offer them asylum. Its just incredible to what degree the US is fucking its own people and how unwarrantedly proud they all are about their country.

To some degree yes everyones life is ruined. The people with nothing still get some medical care, it's the working poor who make too much to get welfare but too little to cover expenses after insurance who are really screwed.

In the US only the wealthy ( millionaires ) are safe from medical bankruptcy and even they can get taken down by some issues.

The hospital bills a million dollars, the health insurance says, no we'll pay you $125,000. That's it. I don't know enough to understand how this situation came about, but the bill the hospital provides is often 2x to 10x the reasonable cost and the insurance company only pays the reasonable cost. And has sort of negotiated this beforehand with the hospital. This is the situation that truly ends up screwing people without insurance, because their only negotiating power is that they literally do not have enough money to pay.

This is really screwed up. "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" is deeply immoral when applied to life and limb. I can hardly understand how a democratic society can accept a system like this.

I mean, can you even imagine other areas of life where every person you purchase from attempts to screw you over by demanding 2x-10x of the reasonable fee unless you had the information to be aware of it? It would be impossible, because everyone would just take their business somewhere else.

But you can't exactly say "oh, I'm not willing to pay my life savings for this, I'll just take this 3 months prematurely born baby to the shop across the street, or maybe get it done in six months time instead, when it's more convenient.".

It's even worse because neither you nor the people treating you actually know how much cost you are incurring. You find out a few weeks later when you get the bill. Imagine if anything else worked like that?