The stories abound of a hospital visit with a magical bill that appears months later with some unpaid sum that's in the 4 digits. Everyone knows someone who this happened to - I happened to know a couple who received a 5-digit bill for a baby who died many many months later. Now, as a rational person you're not going to go to an ER willy nilly, and sometimes an ER is what you get pointed to by smaller medical centers.

The U.S. medical model doesn't work - for the group. It works - for the individual. I had superb eye surgery recently from a top world center and it was fully paid. But the viruses don't care if one of us can afford care, and the other can't, because the virus views us as a singular organism, and now we're all at risk. Which is exactly how the health system should begin viewing us.