This may sound harsh, but medical attention isn't free, and crossing that street without medical insurance and getting hit by a car and accepting expensive treatment you can't pay for is still incurring debt which you are obligated to pay back. This is why insurance of all forms exists; to protect us from expensive, catastrophic events. So as far as fault goes, you are very much to blame if you take risks and choose not to pay for insurance, regardless how expensive it is.
It is totally false to assume that anyone with debt from medical bills must be uninsured.
I had an appendectomy when I was in college and I had insurance and I still received a bill for something like $8000 after the insurance paid out. I managed to have half of that removed due to my very low income, and I luckily was able to pay the rest of it, but this was literally the simplest possible ER visit and surgery you can have and I was lucky to have savings to cover it. If anything worse had happened to me (say, if I got hit by a car) then I could easily have ended up with more than $10k in debt after insurance and after the follow up negotiations with the hospital.
Some insurance would certainly have covered this better, but I had the more expensive of the 2 choices insurance plans that were offered to students at my school. Anyone who is buying their own insurance if it's not provided by their employer isn't going to do much better.
you are very much to blame if you take risks and choose
not to pay for insurance, regardless how expensive it is.
I think I understand where you're coming from. You must live in a society in which no one has ever been denied health insurance due to pre-existing conditions. If I lived in such a society, I might agree with you.
Unless you're lucky enough to live in a country (like where I live) where public health care will cover your expenses. :) In any case you could argue that the driver of the vehicle is responsible for your expenses since they hit you. Unfortunately that's possibly not so easy to do though since people have been conditioned to believe that cars have absolute right of way on the road.
The difference in opinion usually winds up being, one party believes medical attention is a basic human right and should be free for everyone. The other party does not.
Well, it's beside the point. For now, medical care costs money, and people rely on that money for their livelihood, and simply walking away from that debt is wrong.
The cost of medical care in the US is structured to account for bankruptcies - the hospitals get paid in aggregate. The real suckers here are people who actually pay for the care, because they've now paid several multiples of the real cost of the care to account for the people who couldn't afford this ridiculous number and went bankrupt.
The morality behind medical finance in the US is not nearly as clear cut as you think it is.
> "Well, it's beside the point."
It really isn't. It comes down to the core of the issue.
What we have is an industry that collectively charges many times the actual cost of delivering their service and have a monopoly on performing a critical service (licensing, certification). Whether or not this is acceptable hinges hugely on whether or not you believe access to this service is a fundamental right.
There is no way, for example, that we would accept a similar situation if the product in question was fresh water or air.
This is a vast oversimplification of a very complicated problem.
The common public loves to simplify problems, as it makes things easier to comprehend. I think this leads us to this huge partisan gaps in beliefs in this country. Both sides are guilty of boiling down complex problems to a level where people think they "understand" the problem. Unfortunately, there are many more actors, causes, and effect behind the scenes that must be accounted for. It's not a simple cause and effect, Doctors must get paid, argument.
Sure, I'm with you on this, but not everyone agrees, so you can argue with some people about this stuff until you are blue in the face, and never get anywhere, because you are operating on different assumptions. That's my point here.
